Chris Krycho - writinghttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/Fri, 05 Jul 2019 10:45:00 -0400My Final Round of URL Rewrites… Ever.http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/my-final-round-of-url-rewrites-ever.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> web development nerds like me.</i></p>
<p>Those of you subscribed to my <abbr>RSS</abbr> feed most likely saw a bunch of posts again earlier this week. That’s because the canonical <abbr>URL</abbr>s for the posts on my site changed: from <code>www.chriskrycho.com/&lt;year&gt;/&lt;title slug&gt;</code> to <code>v4.chriskrycho.com/&lt;year&gt;/&lt;title slug&gt;</code>. So, for example, <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/all-things-open-2019">my announcement</a> that I’m speaking at All Things Open 2019 moved from <code>www.chriskrycho.com/2019/all-things-open-2019.html</code> to <code>v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/all-things-open-2019.html</code>. I spent much of this past Wednesday working on getting this migration done, after spending a fair bit of time over the last week <em>planning</em> it. Over the course of the next few days, you’ll see <a href="https://v1.chriskrycho.com">v1</a> and <a href="https://v3.chriskrycho.com">v3</a> start working; <a href="https://v2.chriskrycho.com">v2</a> is already up as I write this.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>But <em>why</em>, you ask? Because I now have—at last!—a stable <abbr>URL</abbr> design for my website, which will <em>never have to change again</em>. (“At last” I say because I’ve been thinking about doing this since 2015. It feels <em>great</em> to finally have it done.) I care about stable <abbr>URL</abbr>s. I want a link to my content to work just exactly as well in 10 years as it does today. Don’t break the web! Don’t break all the documents that <em>aren’t</em> on the web but which point to places on the web! Historically, that has meant that <em>every</em> time I launch a new website design, I have to do a bunch of work to move the <em>previous</em> version of the site and create redirects for it.</p>
<p>No more! From this point forward, my content will always live at a <em>versioned</em> <abbr>URL</abbr>. This site is <code>v4.chriskrycho.com</code>. When I launch the redesign I’ve been working on (very soon!), it’ll be <code>v5.chriskrycho.com</code>.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> When I launch another redesign in 5 years, that’ll live at <code>v6.chriskrycho.com</code>—and so on. All I’ll have to do at that point is change where <code>www</code> and the root <code>feed.xml</code> redirect to, and everything else will just keep working.</p>
<p>The idea isn’t new to me—I got it originally from <em>someone</em> else; but I don’t remember who because it has been such a long time since I first saw the idea. I had done something <em>somewhat</em> similar when I launched the last version of my site, archiving the previous version at <code>2012-2013.chriskrycho.com</code>, but I failed to start the <em>new</em> version at a similarly specific location. What this means is that I had to take and redirect every piece of content that lived on what is now <code>v3.chriskrycho.com</code> from <code>www.chriskrycho.com</code> to its new home. Now, as I’m preparing to do the <code>v5</code> launch, I had to do the same <em>again</em>, but this time for what is now at <code>v4</code>!</p>
<p>I don’t want to do this again! Even with building <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/redirects">a small tool</a> to generate either file-based or Netlify redirect rules, getting it right is both time-consuming and error-prone, especially when <em>also</em> needing to do a <abbr title="domain name server">DNS</abbr> migration to <em>create</em> <code>v4.chriskrycho.com</code> and get myself off some old shared hosting and… it was a pain and a lot of manual work.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> The new approach means I will never have to do this again, and I cannot express just how happy that makes me.</p>
<p>So: <code>v4</code> it is for now, and <code>v5</code> coming soon. When that happens, you’ll see an announcement post in your feed, and then you’ll automatically be switched over to the new root feed on the <code>v5</code> site, without having to do anything at all. 🎉</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>For <em>very</em> long-time readers: I also used this as an opportunity to get my old <a href="https://52verses.chriskrycho.com">52 Verses</a> site off of Blogger’s infrastructure and into a purely-static-<abbr>HTML</abbr> setup as well. Happily, that one doesn’t involve any <abbr>URL</abbr> tweaking—just extracting the content from Blogger and pushing it to a static site host.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Feel free to watch that space as I iterate on it! It’s coming together nicely but still has a long way to go.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>The final redirects file is <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/www.chriskrycho.com/blob/d0b2584d94b55060d89c500bf0f146635e17d84f/public/_redirects">here</a>, if you’re curious.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoFri, 05 Jul 2019 10:45:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-07-05:/2019/my-final-round-of-url-rewrites-ever.htmlweb developmentwritingweb designBreaking Up With Social Mediahttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/breaking-up-with-social-media.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> anyone <em>willing</em> to think hard about social media and its place in our lives.</i></p>
<section id="i.-the-itch" class="level2">
<h2>I. The Itch</h2>
<p>I began writing this post from our vacation bedroom in Jamaica, about five days before I could possibly publish it: before we left, I shut down the machines which can generate new versions of my site. I wished, as I started this post, that I had an equally effective measure for cutting off access to social media on this trip.</p>
<p>I tried, of course. Before we left on June 1, I removed Slack and Discord from my iPad (I had long since taken them off my phone). I likewise removed email from my phone, and I have also mostly been leaving my phone in our room. I kept an email client on my iPad, but I have checked my email only once a day or so—mostly in the interest of clearing my inbox, but also because the newsletters I subscribe to make for very good reading materials.</p>
<p>All of this preparation was good. It worked well. The first few days of our vacation were filled, blissfully, with mental silence.</p>
<p>Then I signed into Twitter on June 3, as news started breaking from Apple’s <a href="https://developer.apple.com/wwdc19/"><abbr title="World Wide Developer Conference">WWDC</abbr></a> event. It was fun seeing people’s reactions, and I learned a fair bit about <a href="https://developer.apple.com/xcode/swiftui/">news which excites me a great deal</a>—people were already digging into the new tools and tweeting about them! But it also flipped back on the part of my brain that has been trained (by 14 years of using first Facebook and then Twitter) to <em>obsessively check social media</em>. Mid-afternoon on June 7, I recognized the difference this was making in my mental life. (Yes, it took me most of a week to see it clearly; social media’s effects are insidious.) I signed back out of Twitter’s web client and committed not to sign back in until after our vacation.</p>
<p>I have felt throughout the ensuing days—especially the first—what I can only describe as a mental <em>itch</em>: and it can be scratched only by signing into Twitter, and skimming down through the things people have said, and clicking the little heart button on some of them, and seeing if anyone has interacted with any of my own posts along the way, and trying to say something clever or interesting to elicit more such responses, and refreshing the feed, and skimming down through the things people have said, and…</p>
<p>I dislike the feeling intensely. The itch itself is a distraction, and scratching the itch would produce only more (and worse) distraction. As Craig Mod <a href="https://craigmod.com/roden/027/">described it</a> recently:<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Something fires off in the back of the skull, and then again. No conscious complicity, all autonomous, micro-stimulations. Triggered by: A scroll, a reload, a pull to refresh, a like, a share, the right headline. I can now pinpoint this sequence of involuntary response to be the tiny <em>physio</em>logical loop my body runs through when using Twitter or Instagram.…</p>
<p>I find the tiny loop problem to be terrifying. Tiny loops tend to be perfectly designed to satisfy the id’s raw impulses. That raw id is great fuel for creativity. The concern I have coming back and feeling the loops again for the first time in a long time is: if you’re not careful, tweets and their ilk can burn all your fuel with nothing to show.…</p>
<p>This pain is a withdrawal symptom. But if you get over that compulsion for info-stimulation, you are presented with an opportunity to replace the tiny loops with much more rewarding activities.</p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="ii.-the-costs" class="level2">
<h2>II. The Costs</h2>
<p>I have long observed that my use of Twitter hijacks my mental habits in many other contexts.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> I find myself responding to a book’s ideas not with consideration but with ideas for clever or snarky tweets. (This happened to me multiple times on this trip, including after I had already drafted and repeatedly revised this post!) It is not only Twitter which can have this effect, of course: I have experienced it with blogging as well. But I find that this particularly twisted, <em>distracted</em> form of thinking increases in direct proportion to the amount I use Twitter, and much less so with other forms of writing.</p>
<p>Twitter misaligns my mind even when I am away from it. It discourages <em>thought</em>. As Mod put it, “if you’re not careful, tweets and their ilk can burn all your fuel with nothing to show.” Exactly that. I spend time on Twitter and come out feeling like I have done <em>something</em> but in reality the cycles spent there are pure waste. No thought. No writing. No learning.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> No time spent with my family or friends. Nothing but more fodder for the <a href="https://stratechery.com/2018/data-factories/">data factory</a> and the advertisement money it generates.</p>
<p>The counter-arguments mount up, of course—as they do whenever we think of eliminating a pleasurable vice:</p>
<ul>
<li>But how would I interact with other people in the Rust and Swift communities around ideas or questions I have?</li>
<li>Wouldn’t it be a waste of slowly-built-up influence in the Rust and Ember and TypeScript communities to be absent from that space?</li>
</ul>
<p>…but it turns out, those are the only questions. Both of them are easily answered, too. The aforementioned communities exist, <em>and exist in much richer ways</em>, in contexts besides Twitter—forums, chat, etc. Those other contexts have their own dysfunctions (chat particularly so), but those I will address in their own ways. I can use what influence I do have in those communities more effectively by writing here, answering questions elsewhere, and building software or writing docs or the like. There is simply no sense in which I <em>must</em> be on Twitter for professional reasons.</p>
<p>Moreover, very little of what happens on Twitter is of any lasting import. There is a great deal of Thought Leading,<a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a> but the medium discourages careful, rich, context-sensitive writing: just what is necessary for real work (and not just screaming mobs or fanboying). This is equally as true of software development as of theology. The medium dominates the message. Twitter threads, as I have <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/on-tweeting-instead-of-writing.html">noted before</a> (and see also <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/tweet-less-blog-more.html">here</a> and <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/the-value-of-silence.html">here</a>), are much worse than something like a blog post for their intended purpose. The defining feature of Twitter—the <em>reply</em>—is a bug and not a feature. I <em>love</em> thoughtful replies to my writing… which is <em>precisely why I don’t have comments here but encourage people to email me instead</em>—and Twitter has a far, far worse signal-to-noise ratio than do blog comments. Where’s the upside?</p>
<p>Mod again:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think we’ll look back with shock on many “fundamentals” of the internet as it exists today. I’m still amazed that any private organization would allow unfiltered public commenting. I remain totally unconvinced of its benefits. Twitter, in this sense, is just insanity — an endless stream of public comment posturing and signaling and, largely, screaming. Dumb dumb. Basic ’net folly 101.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If I still feel a bit <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/2019/06/08/devils-bargain/">the way L. M. Sacasas does</a>,<a href="#fn5" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref5" role="doc-noteref"><sup>5</sup></a> too—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>ditching the platform and going indie, as it were, works better when you’ve already got a large audience that is going to follow you where ever you go or an established community (a convivial society, I’d dare say), online and off, with which to sustain your intellectual life. I’m pretty sure I don’t quite have the former, and I’ve struggled to find that latter, making my way as an independent scholar of sorts these last several years.</p>
<p>But again, this is not to say that Alan is wrong, only that my counting the cost is a more conflicted affair.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>—well, so be it. For as he notes himself, the toll <em>will</em> be paid, one way or another:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In any case, I can feel Twitter working on me as I’ve begun to use it more frequently of late and allowed myself to tweet as well as read. I can feel it working on me in much the same way that, in Tolkien’s world, the wearer’s of the Ring can feel it working on them. It leaves one feeling weary, thin, exposed, morally compromised, divided, etc., while deeply distorting one’s view of reality. And, as far as I’m concerned, there are no Tom Bombadil’s, immune to the ring’s power, among us in this case.</p>
</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="iii.-complicity" class="level2">
<h2>III. Complicity</h2>
<p>Counting the cost is complicated in another way for me, too: To what extent can I do this <em>because</em> of my use of Twitter? This site’s audience includes readers who first encountered me and my work <em>there</em>. Even my freedom to leave social media benefits from having used those tools. I cannot escape a degree of complicity in the degradations and distortions that social media have wrought in our culture and our public and our civic life. The best I can say for myself is that I have consciously chosen to eschew click-driven writing for half a decade, whether using Twitter or no. As regards that inescapable complicity, all any of us can do is acknowledge our faults—or, as <a href="https://biblehub.com/james/5-16.htm">my faith</a> would <a href="https://biblehub.com/1_john/1-9.htm">have it</a>, confess and repent of our sins—and seek to make amends.</p>
<p>And there is yet more at stake here. Twitter (like Facebook) is more than merely <em>complicit</em> in the transformation of our world into an attention economy. They have <em>driven</em> it. Their technocratic, restraint-less approach to the world is foolish—at best. And they are unrepentant; “wicked” may thus be not too strong a word.<a href="#fn6" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref6" role="doc-noteref"><sup>6</sup></a> Continuing to use these services only further cements their primacy. As Alan Jacobs <a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/to-put-the-point-plainly/">put it</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The decision to be on Twitter (or Facebook, etc.) is not simply a personal choice. It has run-on effects for you but also for others. When you use the big social media platforms you contribute to their power and influence, and you deplete the energy and value of the open web. You make things worse for everyone. I truly believe that.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even insofar as I do get value from being on Twitter—being able to throw out a question about Rust or Swift or Ember or TypeScript, confident that I will get a knowledgeable answer—I increasingly wonder about the power and social dynamics in play. Is it <em>good</em> or <em>right</em> that, because I have blogged, have worked on open source projects, and have run a successful podcast, I have a greater degree of access? While I have worked hard at those projects, my success in them does not make my questions or interests <em>more important</em> than anyone else’s. Put more bluntly: I do not <em>deserve</em> the attention of Swift compiler developers or Rust or Ember core team members or the TypeScript <abbr title="product manager">PM</abbr>. But I can get that attention, and easily, on Twitter. Some of this is ordinary human social dynamics: earned social trust and so on. But I wonder if Twitter does not <em>heighten</em> the effect. Certainly it seems to me that it may.</p>
</section>
<section id="iv.-the-end-and-a-new-beginning" class="level2">
<h2>IV. The End, and a New Beginning</h2>
<p>Leaving Twitter myself will not begin to undo all of that. But I can undercut, in some small way, the pressure so many other people<a href="#fn7" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref7" role="doc-noteref"><sup>7</sup></a> feel to be on Twitter for professional reasons. Insofar as my own public work succeeds without Twitter, I hope that success helps others come to feel the same freedom. Something more like the <a href="http://tantek.com/2010/281/b1/what-is-the-open-web">open web</a> and the old indie blogger network ethos is a step in the right direction—not in spite of its frictions; rather <a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/scale-is-the-enemy/"><em>because</em> it does not scale</a>.</p>
<p>And more than that: getting <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho/archive/the-slow-web-and-the-limits-of-solutions/">offline entirely</a> at times and for seasons. Remembering the rhythms of life common to all human beings up till a few short years ago. Quietly reading books and talking with friends. It’s time for many more of us to embrace the kind of social media monasticism <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/2018/03/27/vows-of-digital-poverty/">Sacasas outlined</a> in the midst of the #DeleteFacebook movement (and which Stephen and I have talked about so much <a href="https://winningslowly.org/season-7.html">this season of Winning Slowly</a>). I want my attention back, but even more importantly I want to show that <i>this is not all that can or should be</i>. There are alternative paths we might yet take.</p>
<p>So: I have deleted all my tweets save one: a link to this post. I am doing much the same with Facebook and LinkedIn.<a href="#fn8" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref8" role="doc-noteref"><sup>8</sup></a> I hope you’ll consider doing something similar!</p>
<p>Going forward, I will be doing much more writing here. I will also continue to publish <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho">my newsletter</a>, normally on a weekly basis. I will still be <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/podcasts">podcasting</a>. I hope (and expect) to be writing more full-on essays—the area more than any other where I have felt the drain from social media’s interference. And I will be working on <a href="https://buttondown.email/rewrite">rewrite</a>! And if you’d like to get in touch, you can always <a href="mailto:hello@chriskrycho.com">email me</a>!</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>in a newsletter he published after I had already written two full drafts of this post: it was confirmation, not inspiration.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>So do a number of other platforms, whose use I am reconsidering as well—mostly anything <em>chat</em>-like.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>Not <em>truly</em> learned. A new fact found, perhaps, but facts acquired are not the same as learning done. More rarely, a link to a place I <em>can</em> learn something. But such links exist in many places!<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn4" role="doc-endnote"><p>and, worse but in far greater quantity, <em>wannabe</em> Thought Leading<a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn5" role="doc-endnote"><p>in a post, I note, which I had not seen when I wrote the <em>first</em> draft of this post! There is something in the air right now, and I’m glad of it.<a href="#fnref5" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn6" role="doc-endnote"><p>conclusions I have drawn the more starkly through thinking-out-loud about it with my friend <a href="https://stephencarradini.com">Stephen</a> throughout <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> seasons <a href="https://winningslowly.org/season-6.html">6</a> and <a href="https://winningslowly.org/season-7.html">7</a>.<a href="#fnref6" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn7" role="doc-endnote"><p>I initially wrote “everyone” instead of “so many other people” here, but I noticed that that’s simply (very!) wrong: it’s central to the vicious cycle of pressure that social media <em>creates</em>. “Everyone is here; you’ll miss out on such important things!” is <em>the</em> lie of these platforms.<a href="#fnref7" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn8" role="doc-endnote"><p>While I do have reservations about LinkedIn, they are different both in kind and in degree than my concerns about other social media platforms—as my taking a job there just a few months ago should indicate! I would <em>not</em> have taken a job with Facebook or Twitter. I will probably elaborate on this at some point, as I think it’s worth tracing out how and why I see these as meaningfully different!<a href="#fnref8" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoThu, 13 Jun 2019 15:15:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-06-13:/2019/breaking-up-with-social-media.htmlsocial mediawritingattentionethicsFinishing Things on the Internethttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/finishing-things-on-the-internet.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed audience:</a></b> most anyone, but especially people who have followed along with New Rustacean, my experience with burnout, or both!</i></p>
<hr />
<p><i>I am cross-posting this to this site and <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho">my newsletter</a>, and the reason it is a couple days late will be apparent in the content below. A <em>good</em> thing, but a big thing!</i></p>
<hr />
<p>I have in mind today the finishing of things. No surprise, given that today <a href="https://newrustacean.com/show_notes/meta/_3/">I concluded</a> a 3¾-year-long project: my Rust programming language podcast, <a href="https://newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a>.</p>
<p>This conclusion has been a long time coming. I had meant it to happen last year, originally planned it to coincide with the Rust 2018 Edition release, when <em>that</em> was planned for October. The Edition release slipped till December, and this conclusion slipped till now: the end of May, 2019. The reason will be clear to anyone who has followed along with me: <em><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout">burnout</a></em>. 2018 took a serious toll on me, and so this act of finishing was much delayed.</p>
<p>But more than 100 episodes along, with more than 165,000 words of material—I don’t know the actual final length of the show in minutes, though I have a mind to figure it out sometime in the next few days—New Rustacean is <em>concluded</em>. That’s a really good feeling. It is also, I note, a <em>rare</em> feeling as an adult. I <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/a-new-job.html#ii.-on-the-experience-of-change-as-an-adult" title="A New Job – On the Experience of Change as an Adult">noted this</a> back when I moved from Olo to LinkedIn:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Life changes like this are simultaneously momentous and strangely quiet. When I was younger, I expected large shifts in life to have some sense of their importance: a “big bang” feeling to them, and a feeling of finality. It would seem that days like yesterday — as I wrapped up everything that was on my plate and even had a little (all-remote!) hang-out to say goodbye — would lend themselves to just such a sense of import and finality. Instead, it was mostly a day like any other, and at the end of it I was left only with a lingering melancholy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The mix of emotions is different today—but that it is a <em>mix</em>, and that there is no <em>big bang</em> feeling to it, are the same.</p>
<hr />
<p>It is not only that the <em>feeling</em> of finishing a thing is rare, though. It is that, in many cases, actually properly concluding a thing at all is rare. Or at least, in my experience it has been. I have yet to both <em>start</em> and <em>finish</em> a given major project in any of my “regular” day jobs. I have managed major milestones in some of them, and in my consulting work I have finished a few projects as well. But much of my work life has consisted of carrying the ball a few yards further down the field and then setting it down for someone else to do the same.</p>
<p>New Rustacean is <em>not</em> like that. I started it back in September 2015, and I finished it today. It has a real beginning and a real end, and the end is not merely a petering-out, a slowly-giving-up, but rather a long-planned specific conclusion to the project. I started the show to teach people Rust. I stopped when I felt I had done so to my own satisfaction. As I said in the final episode, it is not that there is not an endless array of more I could cover: but that I have covered <em>enough</em>.</p>
<p>Conclusions like this are good for the soul. They are good for the individual soul, to be sure: my own feels lighter and freer and I am very ready for this next phase (the research writing app I have mentioned here before). But I also think that conclusions are good for the public soul, as it were. We burn people out—and I use that phrase advisedly!—by expecting their efforts to go on so long as we, their consumers, enjoy them. By contrast, it seems to me, seeing someone carefully and actively <em>finish</em> a thing helps us remember that people’s lives <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/intentional-cyclicality.html">have seasons</a>, and that no one can (much less <em>should</em>) do a given thing indefinitely, and above all that people exist with lives and interests of their own beyond the ways we may encounter them.</p>
<p>This is perhaps doubly true on the internet, where we have but these small windows into people’s souls. Not that we have perfect windows in person—but people far more often let down their guard and let us see them as they really are (even on accident) when face-to-face than when avatar-to-avatar. Too easily does avarice for attention corrupt—even when we aim at authenticity. And too easily does our communication devolve to perfectly curated self-presentation: even our online authenticity is often performative. It makes it easy to forget how human people are, how we need to find these moments of closure, how much we are <em>not</em> mere factories-of-content but people, possibly with other dreams.</p>
<p>(I’m grateful to report that I have only rarely had nastily-communicated demands from listeners of New Rustacean. But it <em>has</em> happened!)</p>
<p>Conclusions serve as those kinds of reminders. Projects can be good and still come to a close! Sometimes, even, projects are best precisely when they <em>do</em> have definite ends. I hope and think that is so with New Rustacean: that in ending it as I have, I will let it be not something that I burn out on and which someday pitifully trails off, but instead a thing good in its wholeness and its completeness. So I hope, and I can but act, and hope!</p>
Chris KrychoMon, 27 May 2019 21:40:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-05-27:/2019/finishing-things-on-the-internet.htmlpodcastingwritingburnoutBurnout, Six Months Laterhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/burnout-six-months-later.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> anyone who cares about mental health and recovery… but perhaps especially people who have been following me on <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout">this journey</a>.</i></p>
<p>It has been just over six months since I hit the rock-bottom point in my experience of burnout: when I had a panic attack… because a programming task came back with a list of small things that needed tweaking. I have made a lot of changes since then, and am—<a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/stewarding-my-reserves.html">as I wrote earlier this year</a>—not <i>recovered</i> but <i>recovering</i>. I am trying to write about <em>this</em> part of the process too: burnout itself is under-discussed in many ways, but the process of <em>recovering</em> from burnout is not something I have seen discussed at all.</p>
<section id="signs-of-recovery" class="level2">
<h2>Signs of recovery</h2>
<p>So… what does recovery look like so far? And how does it compare with when I was <em>not</em> recovering?</p>
<section id="i-am-sleeping-my-normal-amount-again." class="level3">
<h3>1. I am sleeping my normal amount again.</h3>
<p>For much of late last year I simply had to turn my alarm off and sleep as much as I slept… and that was a good 8½–9 hours. That was pretty unusual: as an adult, I have normally only needed 7–7½ hours. I tried setting an alarm for a bit earlier this year, but found I wasn’t ready for it yet. I kept finding myself unable to drag myself into consciousness most days. Other times, I would manage it, but then find myself exhausted the rest of the week. The tradeoff wasn’t worth it, so I went back to sleeping till I woke up—no alarm.</p>
<p>Over the past few weeks, I’ve been returning to that previous baseline naturally. Still setting no alarm, I have been awakening after 7–7½ hours normally. Some of that is no doubt helped by the early sunrises of late spring, but I have also not been <em>tired</em> at all—I’m ready to go as soon as I wake up, and have the energy to get through the rest of the day and indeed the rest of the week.</p>
<p>This is a relatively quiet change, but it feels rather significant. When people have asked me about my productivity over the years, this is one of the things I’ve pointed to. It is far easier to get a lot done if you only need 7–7½ hours of sleep than if you need 8½–9. That’s an extra 7–14 hours a week!<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> I honestly wasn’t sure if those hours were ever coming back. That they have is a huge relief, and it has been a huge boon to my ability to do the things I want to do.</p>
</section>
<section id="i-am-reading-again" class="level3">
<h3>2. I am reading again</h3>
<p>One of the earliest signs that I was dealing with burnout was that I largely stopped reading books on theology, culture, ethics, etc. I didn’t stop <em>completely</em>, mind—but my pace slowed to a crawl, and I had a hard time maintaining momentum. From roughly June 2016 until the last month or so, reading anything more than popcorn-level fiction just felt like <em>really</em> hard work. I could rarely make myself get through anything longer than an essay.</p>
<p>I made myself do some anyway. With friends, I worked through <cite>Evolution and the Fall</cite> in 2017, and over the course of 2017 and 2018 I read <em>most</em> of Oliver O’Donovan’s <cite>Resurrection and Moral Order</cite> and a good chunk of each of Stewart Brand’s <cite>How Buildings Learn</cite> and <cite>Theology and the Mirror of Scripture</cite> by Kevin Vanhoozer and Daniel Treier. I started working through Augustine’s <cite>City of God</cite> with friends in 2018… and dropped out because I couldn’t make myself get to it.</p>
<p>I read roughly an order of magnitude less than what’s normal for me over those years. To describe this as “out of character” for me is to understate things rather a lot. By the same token, the return of my appetite for books means feeling normal and healthy again in a way that I can hardly put into words. This week I ordered <em>three</em> books—having dug into the first a fair bit via the ebook preview!—and read most of one of them the day it arrived.</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/3-new-books.jpeg" title="Sanders and Swain&#39;s Retrieving Eternal Generation, Barth&#39;s Dogmatics in Outline, and Anderson&#39;s All That&#39;s Good, sitting next to each other on a table." alt="3 new books!" /><figcaption>3 new books!</figcaption>
</figure>
</section>
<section id="i-am-excited-about-projects-again" class="level3">
<h3>3. I am excited about projects again</h3>
<p>Keeping up any kind of momentum on personal projects over the course of 2018 was difficult at best. I mostly managed to keep <a href="https://newrustacean.com/">New Rustacean</a> going; <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> took a worse beating; and <a href="https://massaffection.com">Mass Affection</a>, sadly, stopped basically entirely. (Curiously, I’ve observed that my interest in playing video games at all seems to have waned and waxed in fairly direct proportion to my burnout.) My other outside interests all ground to a halt as well. I did no writing other than blogging, and a good deal of the blogging I did was publicly reflecting on burnout itself. My open-source software contributions were minimal: only what was absolutely necessary to keep those projects moving.</p>
<p>In the last 6 weeks, my interest in those projects has been reviving. I actually started working on in earnest <a href="https://buttondown.email/rewrite">a project I have been planning for ages</a>—including by doing some work to clear the deck for it in my schedule. I’ll probably play a session of <cite>Mass Effect</cite> with Jaimie <em>tonight</em> and we’ll record and publish the corresponding another day this week. I’m more excited by and engaged with Winning Slowly than I have been since late 2016.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> I am, as you can see, blogging again (though, <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/some-closing-thoughts.html#reading-and-writing-1">as promised</a>, I intend to keep a relatively tight limit on this for the sake of actually making good progress on other projects).</p>
</section>
</section>
<section id="signs-im-still-recovering" class="level2">
<h2>Signs I’m Still Recovering</h2>
<p>The net of all these steps forward is that I feel a good deal more <em>myself</em> than I have in a very long time. But there are also signs that I am not yet recovered. In particular, I continue to have less emotional reserves is normal for me. Grief comes bursting out at unexpected times—and, unfortunately, also in unhelpful ways. I find myself fighting hard not to let little annoyances blow up into big frustration or anger. I sometimes get hit by whole days of deep inability to think or concentrate. One day last week I simply had to take a sick day and spent a good chunk of it napping. (And I. do. not. take. naps.)</p>
<p>One aspect of this is that the original triggering stressors that pushed me from <i>deeply (but not consciously) emotionally fatigued</i> to <i>burned out</i> are largely out of the way. This means I have the mental and emotional space to decompress a bit. But when you’re as compressed as I was, decompressing means little bursts of emotional steam come jetting out at surprising moments and in surprising ways. Coupled with all those other symptoms, this is a good sign! It is also a bit hard, but I think that is to be expected.</p>
<p>Another aspect is that the process of unwinding and disentangling the mess that got me here in the first place is <em>ongoing</em>. Identifying, and reckoning with, the pains that I set aside for <i>later</i> until later became <i>right now</i> is a slow process. I had intended to block out some Saturday mornings this spring to go sit with a journal and work through some of those; I found myself too busy to do so. This has to change! It’s no good at all if I let even those good things keep me from dealing with these deeper-seated problems. Letting them go so long un-dealt-with is a major part of what got me here in the first place. I have bumped that up in priority for the months ahead, and have told people close to me so they can hold me to it.</p>
<p>More soon. (But not too soon! I have things to do that aren’t blogging! I have to keep reminding myself of this…)</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Another major factor I point to in my output is not having a commute—which makes for <em>at least</em> another 5 hours.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I loved what we did in Season 6—though it didn’t quite achieve what we were hoping for, in no small part because of my experience with burnout.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoSun, 05 May 2019 19:15:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-05-05:/2019/burnout-six-months-later.htmlburnoutmental healthwritingpodcastingWhat is a Zettelkasten?http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/what-is-a-zettelkasten.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> People interested in note-taking, effective learning, or the idea of a Zettelkasten (which <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/zettelkasten/">I’ve written about before</a>).</i></p>
<p>A friend recently asked me: “What exactly <em>is</em> a Zettelkasten?” Unfortunately, there aren’t any (easy-to-find, anyway) answers in a single place online… hopefully until today!<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> The short answer is: a well-organized box (or group of boxes) of notecards. The word itself is just German for <i>an index card box</i>. Given you likely landed here via an internet search, though, I expect you might want a bit more.</p>
<p>A Zettelkasten as an idea dates to the work of the 20th century German sociologist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Niklas%20Luhmann&amp;go=Go">Niklas Luhmann</a>, who used a large system of carefully labeled notecards (an index card is a <i>zettel</i>) as a form of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext">hypertext</a>. (The linked Wikipedia article notwithstanding, hypertext works perfectly well without any digital technologies: the real key to the idea is <em>links</em> that you can easily follow.) In the system Luhmann devised, each notecard gets a unique identifier, which can then be used to reference it from other notecards, and which have a well-defined order of some sort.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> They can also have keywords—tags—that group them into related sets of ideas. A full Zettelkasten also usually includes not just individual notes but also organizational notes. These serve as pointers and structure for whole other sets of notes—summaries of sets of knowledge you’ve built up over time.</p>
<p>Using this strategy transforms a <em>collection</em> of notes into a <em>web</em> of notes. If you build up that web carefully, you can follow the connections between notes in novel directions over time. This is great for memory, because it helps you cement those relationships in your own mind. Even more importantly, though, working with your notes as a network can produce brand new questions and ideas. Connections that were not immediately apparent can become so as you add more links and structures to the system. The Zettelkasten becomes a tool not merely for recollection but for <em>thought</em>.</p>
<p>The beauty of this approach is its simplicity: A Zettelkasten is just a low-overhead, high-value way of creating, managing, and making use of a system of notes. It can use notecards, or <a href="https://bear.app">any good note-taking app</a>, or any combination of things that lets you easily “link” to and therefore navigate between notes. Its power is not in spite of but precisely because of that simplicity!</p>
<aside>
<p>As it turns out, I’ve tried a lot of different apps for this kind of thing—or <em>especially</em> for research writing in general, of which note-taking is a huge part. Unfortunately, none of the existing apps quite hit the spot for me. So, being a good software developer… I’m building one.</p>
<p>If you’re interested, you can get updates on that project by subscribing to <a href="https://buttondown.email/rewrite">the app newsletter</a>:</p>
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</aside>
<section id="further-reading" class="level2">
<h2>Further Reading</h2>
<p>If you’d like to dig deeper into this, I recommend the posts I have found most helpful:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes">Communicating with Slip Boxes</a> – Luhmann’s own account of working with his Zettelkasten, and the thing I wish I had read <em>first</em>! I particularly found this thought helpful as I have begun building my own set of notes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Usually it is more fruitful to look for formulations of problems that relate heterogeneous things with each other.</p>
</blockquote></li>
<li><p><a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/my-zettelkasten/">my Zettelkasten</a> – Alan Jacobs, with the piece that introduced me to the concept at all, and with an interesting twist on the idea that works particularly well for him (it would not, I think, for me… but there is some overlap with his needs and what I’m doing with the aforementioned project!).</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://zettelkasten.de">Create a Zettelkasten for your Notes to Improve Thinking and Writing</a> – from Zettelkasten.de, tracing out similar themes to what I do here. I have found the site to be a pretty good resource in general.</p></li>
</ul>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I first learned about the idea <a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/my-zettelkasten/">from Alan Jacobs</a>, and then more from <a href="https://zettelkasten.de">a dedicated site</a>—but while Jacobs’ post gives a reasonably good summary, as does <a href="https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-writing/">this post</a> on that dedicated site, neither has much search prominence.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I’ve chosen to organize my own Zettelkasten by date, because <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/blog-as-note-taking-tool.html">I find</a> that seeing what I was thinking at a particular time can be very helpful and very interesting, and it’s also often a <a href="https://zettelkasten.de/posts/add-identity/">helpful way of remembering things</a>.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoMon, 29 Apr 2019 20:00:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-04-29:/2019/what-is-a-zettelkasten.htmlwritingnote-takingzettelkastenSeeing Things Throughhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/seeing-things-through.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> Just about anyone. But especially people interested in ideas of “productivity” or accomplishing the things we set out to do.</i></p>
<p>I have on my mind this week starting things, and finishing things.</p>
<p>I picked up a chest strap heart-rate monitor again a week ago, and took a run with it. It felt like starting (<em>again</em>, in this case!) with running. I am training for a couple of half marathons and a long couple days’ of road cycling in the Rocky Mountains in between them. As I wrote in a <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/serious-running-and-my-heart-rate-monitor.html">blog post earlier this week</a>, putting that chest strap on flipped the little switch in my brain that said “This is serious running again.” It helps to have registered for those races and committed to that event. I have <em>always</em> done better at running when I have had a concrete goal in view. It has helped me with <em>finishing</em>. Though I have had to skip out on a few races I have registered for by way of illness or (in one case) moving across the country, I have only failed to train up sufficiently for a race I had registered for <em>once</em> (and that, too, was a function of illness, though it wasn’t initially clear to me).</p>
<p>Over the past four months I decided it was time to start working seriously on some things I have been thinking about for a long time now. One is developing an app (really: a family of them) that I have been nooding on for almost four years now. Another is learning how to build programming languages. Still another is writing some long-form essays, the subjects of which I have been mulling on in some way or another for as long as five years. My challenge in these kinds of projects is twofold: in many cases, the projects themselves are large enough as to seem daunting to me. In others, though I start them, I find the finishing difficult when I am already tired with the many other things on my plate. Having specific and concrete goals would, it seems to me, <em>help</em>—just as in running.</p>
<p>I have, several times now, started open source software projects and never finished them. I have started a (genuinely interesting!) novel/novella/short story (the format is hard to nail down for this idea!) three or four times, and never seen it through. I have a handful of <em>very good</em> essays sitting in my drafts folder that I began either for this site or for Mere Orthodoxy during my seminary years; some of them are 90% done and had I taken just another half an hour they would have been ready to go.</p>
<p>Strange though it might seem to people who see only what looks like very high productivity from me, I have a surprisingly hard time <em>finishing</em> things. Starting them is easy. But sitting down, week in and week out, to get them across the line—it is <em>hard</em>. The more amorphous the task, the less clear-cut “done” is, the harder I find it.</p>
<p>One of my goals for the rest of my thirties is to get better at this: at picking specific projects and leaning into them until I finish them. Even if that means setting aside other good and important projects along the way. There are only so many hours in the day, and there are many few of them available for side projects when one aims to be a good husband and father. I am still getting a handle on this; more reports from the field as I hopefully improve at it!</p>
Chris KrychoSat, 02 Mar 2019 20:10:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-03-02:/2019/seeing-things-through.htmlwritingsoftware developmentproductivityrunningAnnouncing “Across the Sundering Seas”http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/announcing-across-the-sundering-seas.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> people interested in reading <em>yet more</em> things I write.</i></p>
<p>So I hopped onto the bandwagon that everyone else is in 2019—with the excuse that I’ve been <em>thinking</em> about it since late 2017!—and started an email newsletter: <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho">Across the Sundering Seas</a></p>
<p>One reason I’m interested in the email newsletter as a medium is because I think it can <em>help</em> with <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">the assumed audience problem</a>. A blog is written into the void, and has a certain kind of atemporality and acontextuality to it. Some readers follow along devotedly in their <abbr>RSS</abbr> readers; but equally someone may stumble on something I wrote half a decade ago. That is the beauty and wonder of blogs, and also their great challenge.</p>
<p>An email is a letter to an audience. Like a letter, you can respond, just by hitting the <b>Reply</b> button in your email client! But both of those benefits without the horrible-ness that is public comment threads, and with a much more direct kind of conversation. I can know you’re reading because you <em>want</em> to be, and I can write accordingly.</p>
<p>So here’s to seeing how this goes. I am excited to see how both this and my supporters-only podcast develop over the course of the year. You can <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho/archive/d3ffffa2-8509-4c6b-9dc5-4033171423bf">read the first issue</a>, <a href="https://buttondown.email/chriskrycho">subscribe</a>, or just ignore this if newsletters aren’t your thing!</p>
Chris KrychoSat, 26 Jan 2019 15:30:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-01-26:/2019/announcing-across-the-sundering-seas.htmlwritinglinksMy Current Setuphttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/my-current-setup.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> people interested in productivity and work flow and app choice.</i></p>
<p>A friend was asking me the other day what my workflow looks like, and while I don’t generally spend a <em>lot</em> of time writing about my working setup, I figured I’d throw up a quick post representing my <em>current</em> list so that if people ask I can point them here.</p>
<p>Two important notes on this, though: First, this is <em>just what I use</em>. I make no particular claim that it’s <em>the best</em>. There are lots of things here that are very specific to me and the way I work, and even to my specific mental quirks. Second, it’s far more important to care about the work you do than about the tools you use to get it done. The tools matter: some people say they don’t and I don’t think that’s right at all. But they don’t matter as much as they might <em>feel</em> like they do, and tool fetishism is real. I think the happy point is finding tools which are good enough and fit comfortably enough into your workflow that they don’t <em>distract</em> you, and then get back to the work you do!</p>
<hr />
<section id="software-development" class="level2">
<h2>Software development</h2>
<p>For software development, I currently use:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="https://code.visualstudio.com">VS Code</a> as my primary text editor; I also occasionally use Sublime Text or Vim for specific tasks where it makes sense. Code is incredibly fast, impressively low in memory usage given it’s an Electron app, and remarkably customizable. My only outstanding complaint is that there’s no way to actually make it look like a native macOS app. Happily, I <em>can</em> make it <em>behave</em> like a native macOS app in all the ways that matter to me. Its support for both TypeScript and Rust—the two languages I spend the most time with right now—is <em>great</em>. You’re welcome to see <a href="https://gist.github.com/chriskrycho/f39442dd78ad6d150bcaaadd9fedf9f4">my full configuration</a>; I keep it updated at that location via the <a href="https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Shan.code-settings-sync">Settings Sync</a> plugin.</p></li>
<li><p>macOS’ built-in Terminal app, just using its tabs for individual tasks. I have spent a lot of time with alternatives, including <a href="https://iterm2.com">iTerm 2</a> and <a href="https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/">kitty</a>, and I’m comfortable in <a href="https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki">tmux</a> – but at the end of the day I just like the way Terminal <em>feels</em> the best. It’s fast, light, and built-in macOS things all just work correctly out of the box.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://git-fork.com">Fork</a> for a <a href="https://git-scm.com">git</a> <abbr>GUI</abbr>. I’ve also used <a href="https://www.git-tower.com">Tower</a> in the past, but I’ve found Fork to be lighter, faster, and a better fit for the way I think and how I expect things to behave (e.g. for interactive rebasing). I do a ton of work in git on the command line as well.</p></li>
<li><p>A mix, varying day by day, of Safari Tech Preview, Firefox, and Chrome for my test browsers. I substantially prefer Safari in nearly every way, but Chrome’s dev tools remain best in class for most things—with the exception of Grid, where Firefox is still the undisputed champion. (When I can, I do most of my JavaScript/TypeScript debugging in VS Code, though: it’s a much better experience.)</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://kapeli.com/dash">Dash</a> for offline documentation access. There are other options out there, including some which are free, but Dash remains the best in my experience, and if nothing else it’s deeply integrated into my workflow and muscle memory.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>That’s basically the whole list at the moment. I keep my software development workflow fairly light.</p>
</section>
<section id="research-and-writing" class="level2">
<h2>Research and writing</h2>
<p>For research and writing, I use:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="https://ia.net/writer">iA Writer</a> for all my blogging and longer-form writing. This is a recent change; I had been a heavy user of <a href="http://www.ulysses.app">Ulysses</a> for the last few years. However, while Ulysses was the best option I had found for how I work, it’s never been quite <em>right</em> for me. For one, I’ve always found Ulysses’ “feel” to be a bit heavy: it’s <em>just</em> noticeably slower for me than most of the other writing apps, and I’m hypersensitive to input latency. I’ve also always disliked one of the things that makes many people love it: the way it abstracts Markdown into its “smart text objects.” iA Writer gives me the ability to manage a library in much the same way that Ulysses did, but in a way that feels more truly native on both macOS and iOS; it just uses normal Markdown (no fancy text objects); and it’s <em>fast</em>.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> That combo makes it a better fit for me.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a> for my note-taking. I’ve talked about this <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/starting-to-build-a-zettelkasten.html">a fair bit</a> here <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/zettelkasten-update-all-in-on-bear.html">before</a>, so I won’t belabor the details. It’s an excellent, lightweight note-taking app. The main way it falls down for me is that it does not really handle nested block content in Markdown documents (e.g. it won’t correctly display a block quote inside another block quote, or a code sample inside a list, etc.). I’d also love it if it stored its library in a way that made it easier for me to interact with from other apps, i.e. as plain text on the local drive. (You can export content from it easily enough, which is great, but it’s not quite as seamless as I’d like.) Those nits are just that, though: nits. I’m very happy with Bear for my note-taking at this point.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/unread/">Unread</a> on iOS for reading RSS, with <a href="https://feedbin.com">Feedbin</a> as my long-preferred RSS feed service backing it. (I’m a fan of paying for these kinds of services, so I’m happy to lay out the $5/month for Feedbin. Free alternatives exist, but I don’t love ad-driven models and avoid them where I can.)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>You’ll note that there are no apps for reading <em>longer</em> material on that list. I could mention Apple Books as the place I read most ebooks I read, but that’s more a function of the alternatives not being meaningfully <em>better</em> in the ways I care about.</p>
</section>
<section id="productivity" class="level2">
<h2>“Productivity”</h2>
<p>For “productivity” concerns, I use:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="https://tadamapp.com">Tadam</a> for a Pomodoro timer—because it’s precisely as annoyingly obtrusive as I need it to be, which is <em>very</em>!—and <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a> for <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/just-write-down-what-you-do.html">tracking</a> what I do each Pomodoro cycle, each day, each week, each month, and each year. That habit remains very helpful for me.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://culturedcode.com">Things</a> for a to-do app. Things hits the sweet spot for me in terms of its ability to manage everything from simple tasks and recurring to-do items around the house up to complex multi-month-long projects. I particularly like its distinction between when I want to be <em>reminded</em> about something and when that task is <em>due</em>. I’ve used <a href="https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/">OmniFocus</a> in the past, but it never quite <em>fit</em> me; Things does. They’re very comparable in terms of features; it’s just that the way Things approaches those features works better for me.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://sparkmailapp.com">Spark</a> as my email client, mostly for its snooze feature, which I use when I know I need to see an email <em>as an email</em> sometime later, and its ability to integrate nicely with other apps. I have it connect to Things, and emails that require an <em>action</em> get put there instead of snoozed. The combination lets me keep my inbox at Zero by the end of every day. And its lovely “Inbox Zero” images are a really nice touch:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/inbox-zero-spark.png" alt="Inbox Zero in Spark" /><figcaption>Inbox Zero in Spark</figcaption>
</figure></li>
</ul>
</section>
<section id="podcasting" class="level2">
<h2>Podcasting</h2>
<p>For podcast production, I use:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="https://www.izotope.com/en/products/repair-and-edit/rx.html">iZotope RX</a> (I’m using v6 Standard) for audio cleanup, as I <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/izotope-rx-is-amazing.html">recently wrote about</a>.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.apple.com/logic-pro/">Logic Pro X</a> for the actual editing work most of the time, occasionally using <a href="https://www.wooji-juice.com/products/ferrite/">Ferrite</a>. Logic is overkill for what I do, but I’m <em>fast</em> with it at this point, so I can’t see moving anytime soon, and there’s nothing else out there that I think is substantially <em>better</em> (though there are other apps that are comparably good).</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.overcast.fm/forecast">Forecast</a> for encoding and including chapter breaks.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://reinventedsoftware.com/feeder/">Feeder</a> for generating the <abbr>RSS</abbr> feeds, since all my podcasts are currently built in ways that don’t support <abbr>RSS</abbr> feed generation: <a href="http://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/">Pelican</a> for <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> and <a href="https://massaffection.com">Mass Affection</a>,<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> and <a href="https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustdoc">rustdoc</a> for <a href="https://newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a>. (If I ever manage to finish building my own site generator, it’ll have out-of-the-box support for custom RSS feed templates, so that I can have this stuff generated automatically for me!)</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.netlify.com">Netlify</a> for serving the actual static site content (i.e. HTML, CSS, and JS), and <a href="https://www.backblaze.com/b2">Backblaze B2</a> for hosting the audio.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://panic.com/transmit/">Transmit</a> for actually uploading the audio files.</p></li>
</ul>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>iA Writer seems to get <em>randomly</em> slow at times for reasons I haven’t yet identified, but at least for now, I’m taking that tradeoff over Ulysses’ habit of being a bit slow <em>all the time</em>. As I’ve often noted before: <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/ulysses-byword-and-just-right.html" title="Ulysses, Byword, and “Just Right”">my ideal writing app doesn’t exist</a>.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Mass Affection isn’t dead! I promise!<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoSat, 19 Jan 2019 09:00:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-01-19:/2019/my-current-setup.htmlproductivitypomodoroappswritingreadingsoftware developmentDon’t Forget Your Notebookhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/dont-forget-your-notebook.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> people interested in research, note-taking, memory, and the like.</i></p>
<p>I’m sitting at a coffee shop enjoying a tasty drink and working on an app idea I’ve been slowly fleshing out over the last 3½ years… in a paper notebook.</p>
<p>I’ve been <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/zettelkasten/" title="#zettelkasten on chriskrycho.com">writing a bit</a> here over the last month or so about my experiment in building a <a href="https://zettelkasten.de/posts/extend-your-mind-and-memory-with-a-zettelkasten/" title="Extend Your Mind and Memory With a Zettelkasten">Zettelkasten</a>, and so far I’m quite pleased with it. It’s already proven helpful to me, and given my experiences so far I expect it to be much more so over the (hopefully many!) years ahead. I’ve <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/starting-to-build-a-zettelkasten.html" title="Starting to Build a Zettelkasten">noted</a> that <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/zettelkasten-update-all-in-on-bear.html" title="Zettelkasten Update: All in on Bear">I’m putting all of my notes</a> in <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a>, as it’s a handy tool that <em>mostly</em> maps to the way I think about note-taking.</p>
<p>As I’m sitting working on this app design, though, it strikes me how valuable I find a physical notebook to be. Plain old pen and paper remain my favorite tool for <em>thinking</em>.</p>
<p>I’m not alone in this, <a href="https://zettelkasten.de/posts/use-real-notebook/" title="Use a Real Notebook">even among the proponents of a Zettelkasten approach</a>. Nor does this surprise me. I’ve long observed that I write—and, more importantly—<em>think</em> differently with pen and paper than I do with keyboard and computer.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> That is true <em>especially</em> true of poetry, but it’s still a factor even for something like app design—and not only, but certainly, as a factor of the tactility of it and for the sheer analogicity (if you’ll pardon the neologism) of it. Pen scratching on paper, with <em>genuinely</em> immediate feedback, is different even than the best experience of stylus and laptop.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> Even for something like sketching out a particular <abbr title="user interface">UI</abbr> flow, a notebook affords different things than a tablet does. Perhaps doubly so because of the very analog nature of pen and paper: I am not tempted to make sure my lines are <i>just so</i> on paper as I am on an iPad, where “undo” is a constant temptation, the very expression of the perfect being the enemy of the good.</p>
<p>The net of this is simple: even if you’re adopting something like <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a> for your way of storing and searching your notes, it’s valuable to have paper and pen-or-pencil near to hand. You may spend a little more time copying and elaborating notes as you transfer them from your notebook than you would if you simply did everything digitally from the start, but you will also think different—and, at least in my experience, <em>better</em>—thoughts using pen and paper than not.</p>
<p>It’s a truism in software development that we ought to use the right tool fo the job. The same goes for <em>learning</em>, and we ought not facilely dismiss the old tools simply because the newer ones have their own strengths.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I include iPads here, because the difference <em>seems</em> to be typing into a screen. There are also real differences I perceive between writing with an iPad and keyboard than with a traditional computer, but those pale in comparison to the difference between computer and analog.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I have an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. The responsiveness is astounding and outstanding; but it is not paper and pen.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoThu, 03 Jan 2019 17:40:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-01-03:/2019/dont-forget-your-notebook.htmlwritingZettelkastennote-takingresearchI Have a Patreon!http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/i-have-a-patreon.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience</a>:</b> people who <em>really</em> like this website and like patronage or crowd-funding.</i></p>
<p>Happy 2019, readers! As I move into 2019, I wanted to publicize something that has <em>existed</em> for most of the last year, but which I have not yet made much noise about: <a href="https://patreon.com/chriskrycho">my Patreon</a>!</p>
<p>In this space, I write blog posts and essays on technology, theology, and art. I write about the process of building open-source software. I sometimes even write poetry and compose music and share those here! <em>I do all of those things no matter what.</em> But if you wanted to support my various efforts in this space by helping me stay well-supplied with delicious coffee, I’d really appreciate it!</p>
<p>The benefits for patrons, as I’m publicly launching it:</p>
<table>
<colgroup>
<col style="width: 14%" />
<col style="width: 49%" />
<col style="width: 36%" />
</colgroup>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th>$1/month</th>
<th>$5/month</th>
<th>$25/month</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td>A shoutout on Twitter!</td>
<td>⃪ plus access to a private podcast about what I’m thinking about and working!</td>
<td>⃪ plus commentary and ancillary materials for my essays!</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>I don’t expect this kind of patronage ever to be a massive part of my income. I do think it’s a good thing to support the writers and thinkers whose work impacts us, and so it’s important to <em>let</em> people support us if they’re interested in doing so! So if you’d like to support the work I do on this website, and especially if you’d like to see me do more of the important, careful essays that are the kinds of things I want to be doing, consider supporting me!</p>
<p>(Note that posts about this will not be a regular occurrence on the blog. I will probably integrate a link to the Patreon account into my RSS feed, but otherwise I will not mention it on the site more than once a year.)</p>
<p>Regardless of whether you support my work on this site financially, thank you for reading!</p>
Chris KrychoTue, 01 Jan 2019 10:23:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2019-01-01:/2019/i-have-a-patreon.htmlcrowdfundingpatronagewritingMy Top Five Posts of 2018http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/my-top-five-posts-of-2018.html<p>This time of year I see “most popular on my blog this year” posts flying around. I can’t share those because I stopped doing any kind of analytics half a decade ago and haven’t looked back. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever for my writing, and I commend it to you. In lieu of a “most read” posts (which you’re just reinforcing by doing that anyway!)</p>
<p>Instead, here are the top five <em>best</em> or <em>most important</em> posts I wrote this year, in my opinion.</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/tweet-less-blog-more.html">Tweet Less, Blog More: An uncomplicated game plan for writing this year.</a> (January 2, ~500 words)</p>
<p>Writing tweet storms can be immediately gratifying, but blogging is way better long-term. I hope you’ll consider it for 2019!</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/stop-saying-what-capitalism-does.html">Stop Saying “What Capitalism Does”</a> (March 9, ~1,000 words)</p>
<p>Written after reading the influential essay “The Californian Ideology,” because the phrase “what __ does” makes such a mess of the complicated relationship between people and systems.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/building-things.html">Building Things: A meander on leadership roles and the kinds of contributions we make.</a> (August 6, ~1,000 words)</p>
<p>I had cause to reflect a <em>lot</em> this year on the shape of leadership in technical contexts; here I tried to thread some needles.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/dealing-with-burnout-in-public.html">Dealing With Burnout In Public: Because if I’m going to go through this, it might as well be a help to others.</a> (August 20, ~850 words)</p>
<p>My attempt to provide a Christian frame for my approach to burnout—and why I blogged about it at such length.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audiences: ‘The Internet’ is far too broad an audience for, well, basically any post I write.</a> (October 18, ~700 words)</p>
<p>A new practice for myself, and an attempt to incept it into the world-at-large—because global audiences break everything.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>And, as a bonus, a number of other things I think are interesting:</p>
<ul>
<li>all my <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/zettelkasten/">Zettelkasten posts</a></li>
<li>all my <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout/">burnout posts</a></li>
<li><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/scales-of-feedback-time-in-software-development.html">Scales of Feedback Time in Software Development</a>—my most important technical post this year</li>
<li><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/free-speech.html">Free Speech</a>—on outsourcing all of our public discourse to social media</li>
<li><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/how-i-write-a-talk.html">How I Write a Talk</a></li>
</ul>
Chris KrychoThu, 27 Dec 2018 08:50:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-12-27:/2018/my-top-five-posts-of-2018.htmlwriting2018: Some Closing Thoughtshttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/some-closing-thoughts.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience:</a></b> mostly my future self!—but you’re welcome to read along and see my thoughts on how 2018 went for me and what I hope 2019 will look like.</i></p>
<p>As has long been my tradition<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> I’m wrapping up the year by looking back at what happened in it and thinking about what I’d like to do in the year ahead. I say little here about family or church, but that should not be taken as an indicator of importance: in fact, my commitments in those two spheres deeply inform everything else!</p>
<section id="section" class="level2">
<h2>2018</h2>
<p>2018 was not the year I hoped or expected it might be. It was difficult in a great many ways, and the more so as the year went on. It was not the single hardest year I’ve had—that title goes without question to 2016—but it’s up there. There’s still a lot of good in the mix, but it was hard.</p>
<section id="podcasting" class="level3">
<h3>Podcasting</h3>
<p>I had intended to publish about twice as many episodes of <a href="https://newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a> this year as I was ultimately able to release. My goal was actually to be releasing 3–4 episodes each month, and to cover most of the rest of the language! As it turned out, I was able to release only 1–2 episodes per month. I’m nonetheless very happy with the episodes I <em>did</em> release this year. And <a href="https://newrustacean.com/show_notes/bonus/burnout/">my episode on burnout</a> may end up being one of the most important things to come out of the show, from the email responses I’ve received about it.</p>
<p>We launched a new design of the <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly website</a> and we were able to record and publish about three quarters of the episodes we had planned for Season 6 before the burnout tanked me. There’s a wrap-up episode we recorded and which should be out in a few days (after I edit it!). We also released our 100th episode, which was fun! It was frustrating not to be able to finish everything we had planned, but I remain proud of the work we’ve done there over the last five years, and this season had a couple really important episodes in it. If you didn’t listen to anything else, I’d commend <a href="https://winningslowly.org/6.04/">6.04: Move Slowly and Fix Things</a> and <a href="https://winningslowly.org/6.06/">6.06: A Kind of Blindness</a>. The latter, on “big data” and the difference between information and wisdom, is one of my single favorite episodes of the show.</p>
</section>
<section id="reading-and-writing" class="level3">
<h3>Reading and writing</h3>
<p>I also set out this year to read a lot of books—I had a list of a 14 pieces of nonfiction on the list—and in the end I finished <em>none</em> of them. I participated in a reading group which covered much of <cite>Domain Modeling Made Functional</cite>, and I made it through the first fifth or so of St. Augustine’s <cite>City of God</cite>, but I didn’t even manage to finish a few books I had started <em>last</em> year! The only things I managed to finish were novels:</p>
<ul>
<li>I finished rereading <cite>The Wheel of Time</cite> and enjoyed some new-to-me “popcorn” in the form of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/agent-of-change.html"><cite>Agent of Change</cite></a>.</li>
<li>I devoured Mary Robinette Kowal’s <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/the-calculating-stars.html"><cite>The Calculating Stars</cite></a> and <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/review-the-fated-sky.html"><cite>The Fated Sky</cite></a>.</li>
<li>I read a couple Hugo and Nebula award winners: Larry Niven’s <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/ringworld-review.html"><cite>Ringworld</cite></a> and N.K. Jemisin’s <cite>The Fifth Season</cite>.</li>
</ul>
<p>While those novels were basically the only thing I read, I very much like the habit of writing very short reviews I started with those novels. I expect to keep that habit, and it should be useful as I dig back into nonfiction in the future!</p>
<p>Speaking of writing: for all that this year felt like it was unproductive in some ways, I still ended up blogging to the tune of somewhere around 75,000 words across about 95 posts.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> That’s a solid showing for a year full of burnout (even if burnout itself <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout">ended up being the subject of no few of those</a>: about 6,000 words).<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> But one of my goals for the year was to publish a few longer-form essays, possibly even getting paid for them. That certainly did not happen; I did not manage to publish even a single essay at Mere Orthodoxy.</p>
</section>
<section id="health" class="level3">
<h3>Health</h3>
<p>I ran a fair bit, and am slowly adjusting to living at roughly 7,000 feet above sea level instead of about 400 feet above sea level. But for the third year in a row, I did <em>not</em> manage to run a race. I can still feel, and the more so at this altitude, the lingering effects of the mild case of walking pneumonia I came down with in the summer of 2016. The one thing I did manage in terms of exercise and health was a <em>lot</em> of cycling. Despite my dad’s being in the midst of ongoing monthly chemo treatments for a brain tumor, he and I rode 80 miles in two days together for the <a href="http://www.childrenscoloradofoundation.org/courage-classic">Courage Classic</a>.</p>
</section>
<section id="work" class="level3">
<h3>Work</h3>
<p>Work has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, I accomplished a lot this year. Despite a number of large roadblocks that were entirely outside my control, I led a very important effort to hit several meaningful milestones. I also kept pushing the state of our tooling forward, including some important open-source work, and at the end of November gave a “tech talk” on technical costs which seems to have made a real (if, so far, still small!) impact on the entire organization.</p>
<p>On the other hand, work directly triggered the burnout I experienced. To be sure, I had plenty of existing stressors from moving across and walking through my dad’s fight with cancer with the rest of my family. But the things that pushed me over the edge from <i>tired and worn down</i> to <i>burnout</i> were challenges at work. There were the aforementioned roadblocks. There were some high-stress projects. But most of all, there is a lack of alignment between my engineering and business philosophies and those in play at Olo. Those aren’t <em>moral</em>, but prudential and strategic, kinds of differences—but that does not make them unimportant! More on this below.</p>
</section>
<section id="in-sum" class="level3">
<h3>In sum</h3>
<p>In spite of the burnout, and notwithstanding all the things I did not get done, I’m grateful for this year. My dad has so far not only survived his battle with a brain tumor but is thriving overall. I managed to come through my experience of burnout mostly okay. Our new church has been a great blessing to us, and we’ve been able to step into serving in many ways already.</p>
</section>
</section>
<section id="section-1" class="level2">
<h2>2019</h2>
<p>So looking forward into 2019, my hopes (I dare not call them plans anymore):</p>
<section id="podcasting-1" class="level3">
<h3>Podcasting</h3>
<p>I want to publish the dozen more episodes of <a href="https://newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a> that I had planned for 2018! At my current rate of about two a month, that’ll take me the first six months or so of the year. Once I’m through that list, I’ll have covered the entirety of the language and quite a few of the most important crates in the ecosystem. But there are always new things happening, so I’ll have some interesting decisions to make about where to take the show.</p>
<p>I’m also going to keep producing <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> with Stephen Carradini. We have not yet nailed down what Season 7 will focus on or look like yet, but we’re far from done. The issue is not finding something to talk about, but narrowing it down to which specific things we want to zoom in on! We also have an interview lined up in January (which will come out as an inter-season standalone episode) which we’re <em>very</em> excited about. It’ll be quite different from the other interviews we’ve done, and represents an important step forward for the show.</p>
</section>
<section id="reading-and-writing-1" class="level3">
<h3>Reading and Writing</h3>
<p>My reading and writing goals for the year ahead are intentionally modest. I’ve consistently failed to achieve my more ambitious goals over the past few years, and I’m rather chastened by that. I also have to remind myself fairly often that I will, Lord willing, have many decades of life when I <em>don’t</em> have my kids around. That means both that there is plenty of time to spend on reading and writing later and that there is <em>not</em> very much time to spend with my daughters later. Insofar as I want to continue reading and writing in important ways—and I do!—I need to make my reading and writing time count by approaching them in more focused and targeted ways.</p>
<p>I have people ask me quite regularly for recommendations on various topics, and I simply can’t give them! That needs to change, so I want to read at least four popular level books on theology or culture—about one a quarter. My plan is to review them in this space, but also (more importantly!) to be able to point people in my church toward or away from them. In the long-term, I would love to take up a role (official or not) as a custodian of our church’s library.</p>
<p>I also want to keep my mind sharp and growing on theology, culture, politics, art, etc. I’ve very much felt the lack of engagement on that over the last few years (and have said so here more than once). In that connection, I aim to work through two academic works on theology, and two on some other aspect of culture. I have yet to decide what those will be. Most likely I’ll start by finishing the volumes I already started, but I also expect to spend a bit of time on Patristic Christology, as I’m teaching a class on the person and nature of Jesus in August for our church.</p>
<p>Writing-wise, I know that I’ll continue blogging here. However, I actually hope to blog <em>less</em> overall. The time I spent writing 70,000 words this year was time well-spent, but as I note <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/intentional-cyclicality.html" title="Intentional Cyclicality (March)">time</a> and <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/writing-plans-for-the-rest-of-2018.html" title="Writing Plans for the Rest of 2018 (May)">again</a>, I have a hard time <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/cant-stop-wont-stop.html" title="Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop (September)"><em>not</em> blogging</a>. I plan to work on that in a couple ways.</p>
<p>First, I’m going to try to evaluate, with each idea I have, whether it should be a blog post or just go in my <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/zettelkasten/">Zettelkasten</a>. So much of my writing over the last decade has been a kind of <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/blog-as-note-taking-tool.html">public thinking-out-loud</a>. That’s good, but I also feel much more need to polish something if I’m going to publish it than if it’s a private note. The way I polish a blog post is nothing like the way I polish essays, of course, but I do spend some time clarifying and adding nuance. Even when <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">specifying an assumed audience</a>, I need to be more careful if I am writing for others than if I am working something out by writing about it for myself. As a result, I expect a lot of things which might have ended up on the blog in the past to just go in <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a>.</p>
<p>Second, I plan (and we’ll see how this goes), I’m going to try <em>very</em> hard to write fewer blog posts in favor of more well-developed essays. About a month ago, I started drafting an essay which seems like it might be legitimately important. Unfortunately, even though it is certainly more worth my time than the things I <em>have</em> written since then (<a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/internal-and-external-parameter-names-in-javascript-and-typescript.html">1</a>, <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/starting-to-build-a-zettelkasten.html">2</a>, <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/zettelkasten-update-all-in-on-bear.html">3</a>, <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/stewarding-my-reserves.html">4</a>, <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/hey-siri-record-a-zettel.html">5</a>, <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/javascript-is-c.html">6</a>), I have not made progress since the day I started it. It’s not that my notes on research and note-taking are worthless. Rather, it’s that there is a cost to spending my limited time on writing those instead of more important writing efforts.<a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a> At a minimum, I intend to do even <em>less</em> polish on those posts than I have to date, when I let myself write them.</p>
</section>
<section id="health-1" class="level3">
<h3>Health</h3>
<p>I have a handful of goals for this year in terms of physical health:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>I want to lose about 10 pounds. I’m at a healthy weight currently, but I felt and performed at my best a few years ago when I was down in my target weight range. This is going to require tweaking the <em>content</em>, rather than the <em>quantity</em>, of what I eat, and introduce more variation into the kinds of exercise I’m doing. I can tell both that my metabolism has shifted as I’ve hit my 30’s, and that I’ve acclimated to the workout load that I’ve more-or-less consistently held over the last eight years. It’s annoying, honestly!</p></li>
<li><p>I plan to participate in the <a href="http://www.childrenscoloradofoundation.org/courage-classic">Courage Classic</a> again with my dad, and I’d like to do the 80-mile route at least one of the days. Maybe both days, if he and I are both trained for it! Unfortunately, this probably means investing in a new bike. The one I have currently is almost twenty years old, and it’s a good bike… but it’s increasingly going to need parts replaced. So: CraigsList here I come.</p></li>
<li><p>I’d like to complete another half marathon, probably in May. I don’t particularly care what my pace ends up being: I just want to get back in the rhythm and routine of training and completing the event. I went through a similar push after we moved to North Carolina, and 30 months later I ran the best race of my life. Now, I know that <a href="https://runkeeper.com/user/chriskrycho/activity/684713960">the sub-1:25 time I ran back in 2015</a> is not something I’m apt to see again, especially at altitude, but I’d like to get back to that kind of consistency and discipline (and I’ll see where it gets me!).</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Given that I’m currently planning two events in late spring and summer, I also need to find something to do in the fall and winter next year, just to keep up my fitness level <em>for</em> something. Previous years, I had the same issue for the spring, and the year I was in my very best shape, I played Ultimate in the spring and fall <em>and</em> did a super sprint triathlon in the summer. So: something like that again, perhaps.</p>
</section>
<section id="work-1" class="level3">
<h3>Work</h3>
<p>As I close in on the end of the first decade of my career, I’m <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/career-trajectory.html">thinking a lot</a> about what I want the next decade of my career to look like. I don’t expect to be able to figure it all out ahead of time, of course. At the same time, I’m resolved to find opportunities that align more with my values and the general aims for my career I’ve started developing. As I suggested above, I’ve found that I’m not on the same page as, well, <em>most</em> businesses about how to approach a great many questions. There is no short-term fix for this; but in the longer-term I want to have enough independence to do things more in line with my <a href="https://winningslowly.org">“winning slowly”</a> view of the world.</p>
<p>One part of that is that I intend to push forward on a few things I’ve been plotting for a few years now. I started learning Rust back in the summer of 2015 for a <em>reason</em>, and I’m coming back to that reason this year. I don’t in the least regret the detour that I’ve gone on in the meantime: New Rustacean remains one of my favorite things I’ve done, and is certainly a more important contribution than any code I could have written in that time. But the project that got this all started has my attention again, and I will be spending some of my personal time on it this year.<a href="#fn5" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref5" role="doc-noteref"><sup>5</sup></a> It’s the kind of thing that I rather hope <em>is</em> my career a few years down the line—but there’s a boatload of work to do to get there.</p>
<p>Another part is looking at a much longer horizon even. Over the past three years, I’ve become increasingly interested in programming language theory and practice. I have some ideas and insights I think are genuinely valuable and <em>relatively</em> unique (at a minimum they’re not currently in use in industry anywhere, and I’ve yet to find any papers touching on them) and I would like to see them land at some point. Getting there is a long game; I am not exaggerating when I say that if I ever really make this happen, I expect it to be in my 40s. Probably my <em>late</em> 40s. But that gives me time to learn in the meantime: to build small languages and see what that process is like, to find ways to collaborate on existing language projects, to learn a wide array of existing languages in more detail, and so on. If the ideas I have are ever to come to fruition, all of those things are necessary precursors for my efforts.</p>
<p>Here in late 2018, I have <em>just</em> started on much of that: I am reading a book on programming language development and taking an awful lots of notes along the way. I will be completing the exercises in the book, and I will also be trying to learn enough to build my own little toy languages along the way. I am getting some practice in the pragmatics of it by collaborating with Dave Herman on <a href="https://github.com/tc39/proposal-do-expressions">the <code>do</code> expressions JavaScript proposal</a>, which we hope to make substantial progress on in 2019. These kinds of programming language ideas will <em>not</em> be the emphasis in 2019, but they will be a piece, in the interest of laying the foundations I will need later.</p>
</section>
<section id="in-sum-1" class="level3">
<h3>In sum</h3>
<p>I hope 2019 is a less difficult year than 2018 was. I am also aiming to be more effective in accomplishing the things I care about, in part by setting more modest goals for myself. Keep podcasting. Read a few books of a few specific sorts. Write some essays, at the expense of some blog posts. Start on some new projects, but not in a hurry or a rush. Love my family and love my church.</p>
</section>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I’ve been doing this since 2007, but I’m not linking you to the blog post I wrote that year. There’s nothing quite like reading things I wrote halfway through college to make me cringe. There is some good stuff there, but also: 20-year-old Chris Krycho was, uhh… <em>very</em> emotional. And the way I approach my faith has shifted a lot since then.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Running <code>wc -w</code> on the posts I wrote in 2018 reports 80,911 words, but that number includes all the post metadata. Assuming an average of 65 words of metadata per post, across the 96 posts I wrote, that comes out to around 6,250 words. So: very roughly 75,000, for an average of about 780 words per post. Not too shabby!<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>Meta note: that includes this post. So the final count depends on how long I make the previous footnote. And this one. Such recursion!<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn4" role="doc-endnote"><p>So: what of this kind of year-end review, which is itself not exactly one of those more important writing projects? Good point. I find his exercise helpful, though, and I’d almost certainly be doing it privately in nearly identical terms. I have found this practice helpful over the years, despite never coming near accomplishing the specific goals I’ve set myself, so I expect to keep up this habit.<a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn5" role="doc-endnote"><p>This is another reason for the emphasis on focusing my writing time on high-value projects. Time I spend writing random blog posts is time I am <em>not</em> spending on these programming efforts.<a href="#fnref5" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoSun, 23 Dec 2018 14:35:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-12-23:/2018/some-closing-thoughts.htmlwritingreadingpodcastingburnoutfitnesshealthcareerZettelkasten Update: All in on Bearhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/zettelkasten-update-all-in-on-bear.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience:</a></b> people broadly interested in reading, writing, learning, and research systems.</i></p>
<p>I wrote <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/starting-to-build-a-zettelkasten.html">earlier this week</a> about adopting a Zettelkasten approach for research, and moving writing prompts and ideas from <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a> into <a href="https://ulysses.app">Ulysses</a> as part of that. I’m already reversing course, though, and pushing <em>ideas</em> from Ulysses back over into Bear. (Don’t worry, this isn’t the typical “obsessing over tools <em>instead</em> of doing work” problem. It’s a change that flows out of doing the work.)</p>
<p>The reason is simple: Ulysses is fantastic for organizing writing projects. However, it has a pair of very important (for me) limitations for the ideation and research phase.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>It does <em>not</em> support the kind of easy cross-linking between notes that Bear does. But I find that super handy for saying “these two might belong together in a post.”</p></li>
<li><p>While Ulysses does have keywords (which could in principle work as a kind of tagging system), there is no easy way to navigate around between them. This is even handier than cross-linking for noting that two ideas might go together.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>What’s more, I realized this week that I actually find it <em>quite</em> useful to have my writing ideas in the same place as all my other notes, because it’s much easier to see the other things that might be useful for reference that way.</p>
<p>For the moment, then, my solution is: Ulysses for the actual content of writing projects (talks, essays, blog posts, etc.), but Bear for all the research (notes, quotes, links, etc.).</p>
<p>More on all of this as I work it out for myself!</p>
Chris KrychoSat, 08 Dec 2018 09:55:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-12-08:/2018/zettelkasten-update-all-in-on-bear.htmlresearchwritingZettelkastentoolsStarting to Build a Zettelkastenhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/starting-to-build-a-zettelkasten.html<p><i><b><a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html">Assumed Audience:</a></b> people broadly interested in reading, writing, learning, and research systems.</i></p>
<p>As I’ve been slowly mulling on a number of things over the last few weeks, it became increasingly clear to me that I needed to invest a bit more in my research system. I’ve <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/how-do-you-manage-your-research-notes.html">asked before</a> how people manage their own research, and I’ve noted how <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/blog-as-note-taking-tool.html">I use my blog as a note-taking tool of sorts</a>. As I’ve started digging into a couple larger problems—one of which is likely going to take me a decade of work—I’ve come back to this question, and I find that I still don’t have great answers.</p>
<p>Something like the <a href="https://zettelkasten.de">Zettelkasten approach</a> seems like it probably does what I need it to. So this week I’ve started organizing notes in <a href="https://bear.app">Bear</a> that way. I’m <em>not</em> taking the tack sometimes advocated of intentionally having no hierarchy whatsoever for my notes, though I’m eschewing any particularly deep hierarchies. I consistently find that I need some kind of project or “notebook” level of organization when I’m digging deep on something, and it’s always nice to hear that I’m not alone in that. <a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/my-zettelkasten/">Alan Jacobs, on the same topic:</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well, I thought, why not have a collection of Zettel that is based not on a lifetime of research but on a single project? So I tried that. And it worked wonderfully.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unlike Jacobs, the notecard system doesn’t work for me. I enjoy writing notes by hand, but in a lot of cases I’m writing down code snippets, which is very hard to do on notecards unless the code snippets are <em>very</em> brief. Instead, I’m so far making heavy use of Bear’s ability to <a href="https://bear.app/faq/Tags%20&amp;%20Linking/How%20to%20link%20notes%20together/">link between notes</a>, and even heavier use of Bear’s <a href="https://bear.app/faq/Tags%20&amp;%20Linking/Nested%20Tags/">tagging system</a> for adding keywords to notes.</p>
<p>In line with my comment about hierarchy, though, I’m only allowing myself one level of hierarchy: the “project” or “notebook.” Everything in that “notebook” is a single keyword/tag deep, structured like <code>&lt;notebook&gt;/&lt;keyword&gt;</code>—never <code>&lt;notebook&gt;/&lt;keyword&gt;/&lt;another keyword.</code>. I am also freely including tags across these “notebooks”: something might be in <code>A/q</code> and also <code>C/z</code>. That gives me the best of both worlds: project-level organization, but also the ability to see associations that play out beyond an individual project.</p>
<p>We’ll see how this plays out, but so far I’m liking it a lot.</p>
<p>Amusingly, it’s forcing me to clean up my existing set of notes in Bear: things tagged “writing/ideas” are now getting pushed over into a corresponding bucket in <a href="https://ulysses.app">Ulysses</a>, which is my preferred application for actually <em>writing</em>. Miscellaneous/non-project notes are currently going in a top level “notebook”—a top level tag in Bear—called <code>z</code> (for Zettelkasten). Under it I have things like <code>z/pedagogy</code>, but once again, I’m intentionally allowing myself only one level of nesting here. I am still <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/just-write-down-what-you-do.html">logging my work</a> in a work tag. And I also have notebooks for things like food, gift ideas, etc., since Bear is currently my go-to notes app. (This is part of what forced me to the project/notebook mentality in the first place: having dozens of top-level tags in that sidebar was just going to break my brain.) But hopefully having all these notes around and in a just-structured-<em>enough</em> form will be useful as I work on these larger projects.</p>
<p>I’ll report more as I keep going with this!</p>
Chris KrychoWed, 05 Dec 2018 08:30:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-12-05:/2018/starting-to-build-a-zettelkasten.htmlwritingresearchZettelkastennotesAssumed Audienceshttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/assumed-audiences.html<p><i class=editorial><strong>Assumed audience:</strong> everyone on the internet.</i></p>
<p>I am working on a post about something I think is interesting in programming, and shared it with a friend last night to get some feedback on what I had written so far. His response made me realize that the post left me open to wild and massive misinterpretation of my intent. (The specific details aren’t really that interesting for my broader point here.)</p>
<p>I was thinking about how to clarify that, and it took me back to a Winning Slowly episode we recorded back in 2015, with the wonderful title <a href="https://winningslowly.org/2.02/">Basketballs ≠ Pumpkins</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In which we talk about… the general phenomenon of things you say on the internet going viral (often when you least expect them to). How do you deal with the reality that your audience is never limited but may universalize at any moment? What is the audience’s responsibility, and what are creators’ responsibilities? How do we deal charitably with authors writing “in-house” on controversial topics?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The basic problem here is that a blog post is open to everyone on the internet to read… but <em>everyone on the internet</em> is far too broad an audience for, well, basically <em>any</em> post I write. (Or indeed any post anyone writes.)</p>
<p>What’s more, for any given post I write, there is an <em>implicit</em> audience. You as reader just have no way of knowing who I have in mind. Maybe I <em>am</em> thinking of “the whole internet,” but that certainly isn’t the case for <em>most</em> posts. So what if I just made my intended audience explicit?</p>
<p>My current best solution for handling this phenomenon is an “assumed audience” heading on the top of a post. It won’t head off <em>all</em> the nonsense, of course. But it at least gives people a frame of reference. A few examples that leap to mind:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Assumed audience:</strong> other theologically conservative Christians in the <abbr title="Presbyterian Church in America">PCA</abbr></li>
<li><strong>Assumed audience:</strong> people curious about functional programming</li>
<li><strong>Assumed audience:</strong> experienced Rust developers</li>
<li><strong>Assumed audience:</strong> people outright hostile to religious belief</li>
</ul>
<p>Each of those are people I might actually address on this blog—and there are plenty of others, of course. What’s potentially useful about this kind of thing is that good-faith readers know how to approach the content. Bad-faith readers will of course do with any text what they will. I cannot stop someone from hate-reading me. All I can do is put up sign-posts for people who are <em>interested</em> in good faith readings.</p>
<p>For example, if you’re a die-hard devotee of dynamic programming languages, a note that the assumed audience is people interested in advanced static types tells you that my point isn’t persuading <em>you</em>, but persuading someone else entirely. You can adjust your read accordingly.</p>
<p>Likewise, if I’m writing on Christian ethics with an assumed audience of secular progressives, and you’re a fundamentalist Christian, you can read with the understanding that I will frame things differently for someone who disagrees with me about everything (down to and including the nature of reality itself!) than if we were having an “in-house” conversation! You can adjust your read accordingly.</p>
<p>I’m increasingly convinced something like this is important. <em>Very</em> important, even.</p>
<p>It’s worthwhile to blog and write publicly—some of the best feedback I get on things I write is from total strangers!—but it’s also very difficult to write effectively when everything must be couched in forty-eight layers of nuance and qualification just in case someone from a different tribe happens along.</p>
<p>Maybe I’ll just be this weird guy over here marking my posts this way, or maybe it’ll catch on with other weird people and a few corners of the internet will be a little less open to misunderstanding. Maybe people will completely ignore them and engage in full on flame wars on Twitter and Hacker News. (That seems more likely than not.) I think it’s worth a shot anyway. Let’s try it and find out!</p>
<p><strong>Edit, October 19, 2018:</strong> Thanks to <a href="https://stephencarradini.com">Stephen Carradini</a> for reminding me to include a shout-out to Sarah Constantin’s blog <a href="https://srconstantin.wordpress.com">Otium</a>, which introduces posts with a similar heading, “Epistemic status,” to indicate how confident the author is or isn’t about the contents of the given post. I meant to include a shout-out to Otium in the original writeup and just spaced it!</p>
Chris KrychoThu, 18 Oct 2018 19:00:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-10-18:/2018/assumed-audiences.htmlwritingreadingCan’t Stop, Won’t Stophttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/cant-stop-wont-stop.html<p>A couple things have had me thinking about blogging today. I happened to end up reading <a href="http://christineyen.com/2014/01/in-2014-reflection-consistency-and-balls/">this post by Christine Yen from 2014</a> just a few hours after listening to <a href="https://craigmod.com/onmargins/005/">Craig Mod’s interview with Jason Kottke</a>. They have two very different takes on blogging. Yen’s piece has the sense so often echoed online: “I want to be blogging more.” Mod’s interview with Kottke notes how remarkable a 20-year-old website with daily blog-like entries throughout is, and Kottke emphasizes how he loves the work (and it is work!) that he does to keep it up.</p>
<p>My relationship with blogging is somewhere nearer Kottke than Yen on that spectrum. While I have <em>occasionally</em> resolved to blog more—and occasionally to <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/writing-plans-for-the-rest-of-2018.html">blog <em>less</em></a>!—I find that mostly my problem is that I cannot stop blogging even if I want to.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>One of the things that’s strange about <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout">burnout</a> is that what constitutes <em>rest</em> from the stressors will vary from person to person. Writing, for may people, might be a source of tension or stress. The perceived <em>obligation</em> to generate content can be stressful.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> But far more often, writing is restful for me. It is a way of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/blog-as-note-taking-tool.html">organizing my mental life</a>—publicly, but (at least) as much for my own benefit as for that of potential readers—and organizing my mental life is somehow a good form of stress relief.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> So it turns out that blogging—not on a schedule, not on a deadline, but whenever I feel like it (and that is obviously a lot)—is good for me in the midst of this. It seems to go in the same basic bucket as running.</p>
<p>So: my aim back in May, just before I realized what exactly I’m dealing with in burnout, to blog less in the interest of getting <em>other</em> projects done? When I said this?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t think I could stop myself from blogging that way from time to time if I <em>wanted</em> to. But it won’t be the focus, and if things are relatively quiet around here for much of the rest of the year, don’t worry… you know why!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, at this point I’ve let that go. Subconsciously at first. Now consciously. I wasn’t wrong when I said couldn’t stop myself from writing <em>entirely</em>. Now I just know that I also <em>mostly shouldn’t.</em> There may be points on other writing projects in the future, times when I’m not dealing with not-so-mild-anymore burnout, when I can and should. But not now.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>In truth, as this blog post suggests, I cannot even stop blogging about blogging! I’ve been metablogging for over a decade now; don’t expect it to stop anytime soon!<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>More than one thoughtful listener to my <a href="https://newrustacean.com/show_notes/bonus/burnout/">most recent New Rustacean episode</a> responded along these very lines; and it’s a point I haven’t made here before, so: consider it raised.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>Interpret that as you will. I have given it no small amount of thought myself. As I noted on the aforementioned latest New Rustacean episode: I am hypermetacognitive, and my incessant metacogitating is a source of alternating bemusement and frustration for my poor wife.</p>
<p>Yes. I said “incessant metacogitating.” This is what poor Jaimie has to put up with.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoWed, 26 Sep 2018 20:15:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-09-26:/2018/cant-stop-wont-stop.htmlwritingbloggingburnoutOnce More Around The Wheelhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/once-more-around-the-wheel.html<p>I very much wish my publishing needs were not so… complicated. Academic writing—though that’s done for a while—poetry, code, and a strong preference for semantic HTML to be generated by it along with an equally strong preference for plain text authoring…</p>
<p>Nothing works for me.</p>
<p>The only Markdown parser out there which does the right thing with all of those is <a href="http://pandoc.org">Pandoc</a>. The options for using Pandoc directly are not great. Shelling out to it via <a href="https://getpelican.com">Pelican</a> (my current strategy) works but is <em>slow</em>. The implemented-in-Rust <a href="https://www.getgutenberg.io">Gutenberg</a> generator looks like <em>exactly</em> what I want performance-wise, but its <a href="https://github.com/google/pulldown-cmark" title="pulldown-cmark">underlying Markdown engine</a> doesn’t support citations <em>or</em> poetry.</p>
<p>I keep coming back to the conclusion that I’m basically going to have to build whatever I want myself, if I want my desired publishing flow to exist. I don’t really <em>want</em> to do that, though. It’s a boatload of work, even “just”—just!—to do something like (a) learn Haskell well enough to build on top of Pandoc directly or (b) build a good C-based API wrapper in Rust so that I can do it <em>that</em> way or (c) extend <a href="https://github.com/google/pulldown-cmark">pulldown-cmark</a> to support poetry and citation management.</p>
<p>For lots of reasons (c) is probably what I’ll ultimately end up doing; I want that for more than just blogging. More on that eventually, I hope.</p>
<p>But in the meantime I really just… want someone else to have the same weird needs I do and build this for me. I just know full well at this point that that’s not going to happen, and accordingly am basically resigned to muddling along with Pelican and Pandoc until such a time as I can actually buckle down and build what I want and need.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> <em>C’est la vie.</em></p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>As an aside: the prospect of buckling down and building things like that in my spare time is <em>much</em> less appealing given my current <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout/">struggles with burnout</a>, and as I’ll write about at some point in the future I feel a (perhaps-surprising to you, my reader) lack of confidence about my <em>ability</em> to accomplish those things.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoFri, 31 Aug 2018 18:30:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-08-31:/2018/once-more-around-the-wheel.htmlwritingbloggingstatic site generatorsGive Me Chronological Archives or Go Awayhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/give-me-chronological-archives-or-go-away.html<p>I was looking at the (really excellent) content in Vaidehi Joshi’s <a href="https://medium.com/basecs">basecs</a> series, and it crystallized something for me: Algorithmically-sorted archives for blogs are hyper-user-hostile and I <em>hate</em> them.</p>
<p>Trying to just work through that series in chronological order of publication is <em>nearly</em>—not quite <em>actually</em>, but <em>nearly</em>—impossible. Never mind that the series is a <em>series</em>, and that most posts build on earlier posts, Medium wants to <em>foster engagement</em> and tell you what other people have read most.</p>
<p>It keeps up this nonsense even when you pull the the Archive view: it displays the top 10 posts from 2017, sorted by which ones people read most. There’s no view of <em>all</em> the posts in the series, simply sorted by date, period. You can sort those top 10 posts by date, but to get to the series in chronological sequence, you have to click into each month… and then click the button <em>again</em> to sort by date <em>for every single month</em>.</p>
<p>This absurd focus on algorithmic sorting is an abomination—a desecration of all that is good and noble and beautiful about the format of the blog. It should die an ignominious death, unmourned by anyone but Silicon Valley venture capitalists thinking to make a quick buck on other people’s publishing efforts.</p>
Chris KrychoSat, 25 Aug 2018 12:15:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-08-25:/2018/give-me-chronological-archives-or-go-away.htmlwritingbloggingpublishingmediumDealing With Burnout In Publichttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/dealing-with-burnout-in-public.html<p>For the last several months, I’ve been experiencing what I <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/some-mild-burnout.html" title="Some Mild Burnout">initially described</a> as <em>mild burnout</em>. I’m not sure how mild it is at this point, but I’m definitely still experiencing it. As a result, I’m still thinking about how to mitigate it, minimize the length of it, and not least to walk through it well as a Christian.</p>
<p>One of my aims–we will see how this plays out, but it is an aim–is to walk through this experience of burnout as publicly as seems appropriate. My reason is basically the same as I noted at the end of the post where I first noted publicly my experience of burnout. Seeing that others have gone through this, and seeing what helped them, can sometimes be a help to us as we walk through things. My experience won’t totally generalize. Some of the things I conclude aren’t going to stick for others because they reject my priors–more on that in a moment. But nonetheless, having something of a public record of dealing with something like this seems to me to be a broadly good thing if it’s done well. I hope to do it well. (I also hope you’ll bear with me insofar as I don’t!)</p>
<hr />
<p>I noted that one of my interests is in what it looks like to walk through burnout as a Christian, specifically. This seems to be an interesting and relatively open topic. Most of the literature I’ve bumped into on the subject is explicitly secular, and it uses language and approaches I find <em>partial</em> at best and <em>outright wrong</em> at worst. I have a good resource paper to work through from my pastor–who, in God’s providence, wrote an academic research paper on the question for part of his D. Min. work–and I expect to be leaning a fair bit on the things I find there and in further secondary resources.</p>
<p>At the same time, if my experience watching my wife walk through serious clinical depression over the last decade is any guide, there is a lot yet to be thought through and written about in this space. Nearly all the material I’ve encountered on depression in that time–<em>not</em> all, but nearly all–misses the boat in one way or another. On just one of the many poles: the approaches tend either to wholly medicalize depression, or to throw medical factors out the window. Both of these responses seem to me very specifically <em>sub</em>-Christian in their view of the human person.</p>
<p>So likewise does much of the literature I have found on burnout so far. The language of “self-care,” for example, is well-intentioned and much of the advice that comes with it is good. (I’ll try to unpack some of that at some point.) Yet I also think that framing does as much harm as good. My response to burnout is not merely a matter of taking care of myself as though my being happy and healthy is an end in and of itself. Rather, in a Christian frame, I ought to think in terms of <em>wisely stewarding my body and mind</em>–a very different thing. The language of “stewardship” implies the end of the things I choose to do and not to do: not merely my own well-being, but my being able to steadfastly and faithfully honor God and serve the church and love all those around me well (Christian and non-Christian alike!).</p>
<p>This is not merely a semantic game. The language we use, the way we choose to frame our lives, <em>matters</em>. Self-care is about me. Stewardship involves me but is not about me.</p>
<p>On the other hand, much of the Christian discussion of issues like depression or burnout seems (curiously) narrow in its understanding of how to treat these problems. They are very often reduced simply to a question of one’s faith: if one were only more intent on taking joy in salvation, this problem would go away. To which I say: <em>have you read the Psalms?</em> And more: <em>have you read Genesis 3?</em> And not least: <em>have you read the gospels?</em> When above I described what I have read as “sub-Christian,” I had these kinds of things in mind no less than the more “secular” advice. This kind of advice–to pray more and read one’s Bible more and repent of sin more–is not wrong, but it is desperately incomplete. When “seek joy more!” is <em>all</em> that is on offer, what is evidenced is an impoverished anthropology, a view of human nature that forgets our physicality or diminishes it to an ancillary to the <em>real</em>, spiritual self; and which fails to grasp the ways our brokenness is not merely a matter of our choices but also of the world we encounter and the bodies and minds we find ourselves bearing as their own kinds of crosses in this age.</p>
<p>My own thoughts here are still nascent in many ways, though already shaped in many ways by the experience of watching my wife bear up well under her own burdens these last ten years. But I hope that as I trace them out–and also simply explain <em>how things are</em>–that it will be helpful and encouraging to some other travelers along this particularly thorny way.</p>
Chris KrychoMon, 20 Aug 2018 07:00:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-08-20:/2018/dealing-with-burnout-in-public.htmlburnoutwritingdepression“Free Speech”http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/free-speech.html<p>Every time there is a major controversy about large platforms blocking or delisting some controversial figure, something like the following exchange follows:<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Person 1:</strong> But what about free speech? You’re censoring this party!</p>
<p><strong>Person 2:</strong> [Twitter/Facebook/Youtube/etc.] is a private platform! Free speech guarantees the right not to be jailed for what you say, <em>not</em> the right to have it on every platform you want.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So far as it goes, this is true. XKCD’s explanation is completely right on the legal merits:</p>
<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/1357/"><img src="http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/a/ae/free_speech.png" title="XKCD 1357: Free Speech" /></a></p>
<p>But while this is all true in some sense, it also seems to me to be missing the larger and <em>much</em> more important point. Namely: the whole reason we have these arguments—and the reason people tend to think as they do about the “free speech” question in these situations, legally nonsensical or not—is that we have outsourced the vast majority of our public discourse to these private platforms.</p>
<p>Twitter and Facebook have become the <em>de facto</em> public fora of the 2010s, with Google’s search results and Wikipedia’s summaries taking similarly authoritative roles on what <em>exists</em> and what <em>is true</em>. Not that most people would put it that way, but it remains true: if something isn’t in Google search, it might as well not exist on the internet, and therefore for many people <em>at all</em>. Likewise with Wikipedia’s summaries: the admonitions of every college professor in the world notwithstanding, what Wikipedia says has an undeniable authority. And when someone is blacklisted from Twitter or Facebook, their ability to be heard at all by internet users as a block is <em>dramatically</em> curtailed.</p>
<p>This centralization of discussion and information into a few private platforms has a great many downsides. But perhaps chief among them is that we have ceded major aspects of our public and civic life to private platforms, and their interests are not the interests of the public good. They are driven almost entirely by the profit motive, or (possibly even worse at times) by nebulous and chimeric ideologies that treat “connecting people [digitally]” or “organizing the world’s information” as inherent and superlative goods. So when someone has their page removed from Facebook, or their website blacklisted from Google, there is a real sense in which they <em>have</em> been removed from public discourse and their speech “silenced”—even if not in an illegal sense.</p>
<p>For the purposes of this post, though, I could not care less what the major internet companies do or don’t show on their platforms. Instead, I worry about our practice both as individuals and also as communities-of-practice—churches, associations, and so on—of abdicating our responsibility to maintain real public and civic lives in our local places in favor of letting these corporate giants do the work for us. I worry about the costs of letting Google and Facebook replace genuine public fora in our lives. I worry about the long-term effect of letting supranational megacorporations driven by that toxic combination of profit motive and nonsensical ideologies set the terms of our lives. I worry about the whole set of underlying structural and systematic moves that have made delisting on one of those platforms seem like a violation of the ideal of free speech.</p>
<p>As I’ve said for many years in this space: we should work hard at reclaiming our lives from the tangle of the corporations. We should limit the way we both use and think about these platforms. We should read books, old and new, rather than simply rely on the Google results and Wikipedia summaries. We should have painful, awkward conversations and indeed arguments with neighbors and colleagues and family members rather than merely all-caps shouting at each other on Facebook or Twitter. We should carve out our own spaces on the internet, <a href="http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/37863874092">owning our own turf</a>; but more than that we should remember that even that is no substitute for the thicker (and yes, more painful, frustrating, and awkward!) communities and interactions of a church or a neighborhood or a town hall meeting.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Given the context in which I’m writing this, it’s probably helpful to say that I think InfoWars is a font of demonic lies. I’m a Christian; I mean that literally.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoSat, 11 Aug 2018 10:35:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-08-11:/2018/free-speech.htmlwritingethicspoliticssocial mediaTwitterindie webBlog as Note-Taking Toolhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/blog-as-note-taking-tool.html<p>I have a habit that might not make sense to you. I reread my own blog posts fairly regularly. It’s not vanity—not some weird obsession with my own awesomeness in the form of my own writing or some such nonsense. It’s that in my blog posts over the last decade, I have a pretty serious backlog of <em>what I was thinking about at any given point in time.</em></p>
<p>It’s not exhaustive, by a long shot. It only includes things I actually decided to publish.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> There are, sadly, not many short thoughts in the mix. Nor is it well-tagged or organized in any internally-consistent way—even in any single version of the site, much less across versions. But nonetheless the history is still there, and I <em>can</em> traverse the various lines through it, such as they are. (Sometimes, even, the changes in organization and structure are illuminating about how I was thinking about things at the time!) In any case, my habit of linking to previous references to ideas has proven invaluable for the times when I want to trawl back through old posts and consider those old thoughts again.</p>
<p>Reading old blog posts is a strange experience, of course. The person who wrote these things was recognizably myself; but I am not who I then I was, and I sometimes disagree with myself on the substance and often on the style. (I occasionally find an old gem and wonder how I ever managed to write so well.) That very strangeness, it turns out, is why I do this every so often, though. Thinking well is often a matter of forging connections between ideas that were previously not connected for us. We cannot consciously hold in our minds even a fraction of all the things we have thought about or even written something about over the years. We can, however, jog our memories, and let new connections form. And rereading one’s own blog post is a great way to do that.</p>
<p>I’d not heard specifically of the <a href="https://zettelkasten.de">Zettelkasten method</a> until Alan Jacobs linked it a while back, but it fits this model pretty perfectly, and maps as well to ways I’ve been <em>trying</em> to structure my note-taking and thinking for the past few years. (I’m going to be consciously doing more of this in <a href="http://www.bear-writer.com">Bear</a>, my current notes app of choice. I’ll probably write up my experience that way once I’ve actually had some experience!) But this also ties into some of the things Jacobs has been <a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/the-blog-garden/" title="The Blog Garden">musing out loud</a> about in his own blog over the last week. It’s not just that a blog can serve as a place to do some of the fleshing-out of ideas. It’s not just that a blog can be a record of the development of ideas. It can also serve to jog new ideas if you read yourself again, displaced (both literally and temporally) from the original writing of the thing. A blog is kind of like a public notebook, and while it <em>may</em> be useful for others to browse through it, is <em>is</em> useful for me to browse back through it.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Though: if you look at the archives, especially including those on my <a href="http://blog.chriskrycho.com" title="Thoughts; A Flame">first real blog</a> and <a href="http://2012-2013.chriskrycho.com">the previous iteration of this site</a>, you’ll notice that I published a lot of posts about a lot of subjects, whether my thoughts were especially well-formed or not.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoMon, 16 Jul 2018 07:00:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-07-16:/2018/blog-as-note-taking-tool.htmlZettelkastennotesmemorywritingbloggingThe Value of a Good Habithttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/the-value-of-a-good-habit.html<p>Since December, I’ve been working on <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html" title="Knowing Your Rhythms--Or: why I&#39;m marking out all the time before 7am as mine.">writing every day before I start work</a>. I am content to admit that I certainly haven’t done it every single day along the way–but I’m content with that admission in no small part because I <em>have</em> done it <em>most</em> days along the way. And it has been genuinely wonderful.</p>
<p>The things I have written along the way have come in many forms:</p>
<ul>
<li>I’ve published around 50,000 words on this site already this year (even if ‘word count’ here is a loose metric: it includes lots of code samples and in some cases those code samples are repeated for effect)</li>
<li>I’ve put together a workshop and a couple of short talks on <a href="https://www.emberjs.com">Ember</a> and <a href="https://www.typescriptlang.org">TypeScript</a>.</li>
<li>I’ve written a talk on the future of our front-end development practices at Olo.</li>
<li>I’ve written and published 11 episodes of New Rustacean (totaling about 25,000 more words!).</li>
</ul>
<p>And very little of that could have or would have happened without the time I’ve dedicated nearly every weekday morning to writing.</p>
<p>It’s not so much that I’m hyper-productive on any one day. To the contrary: many days along the way I struggled just to get out a few hundred words of one of the projects I was working on, and those projects (however much I love them) have sometimes ended up being something of a slog. It’s okay: that’s the point of building the habit in.</p>
<p>I’ve made the analogy before–as have many others, I’m sure!–of writing to running. There are many days when going for a run doesn’t actually seem all that appealing, but I go anyway, because I’ve long since developed the habit of just getting out whether I feel like it or not. Some of those days I very much do not enjoy the actual run, either: I find myself somewhere out along the way and end up feeling sick or simply having to work much harder than I could wish. But even if it’s a short and unpleasant run in the end, I come away having gone for a run.</p>
<p>Writing (or any other valuable habit) seems to be much the same. There are days I do not feel like doing it. There are days when the doing of it is hard, when I feel like I have to drag the words out of myself. There have been days even just in the last few weeks where I realized that words I’d written on previous days simply had to be thrown away–content for New Rustacean that ranged from ill-worded to actually-wrong, for example.</p>
<p>But I have been able to say, nearly every workday when I wasn’t sick or traveling, that I did in fact write <em>something</em>. And that’s enough, in truth. As I noted <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/momentum.html" title="Momentum--Two weeks of daily writing, and how &quot;productivity&quot; happens.">when I began building this habit</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[The] early morning is the best time for me to be writing, and I get a lot of mileage out of taking anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes to get at it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As I recognized six months ago, even when an individual day here or there slips, doing the work to make writing habitual means that the <em>other</em> days don’t. The result is that, delightfully, I’ve been able to get a lot of writing done, even through times when I <em>really</em> didn’t feel like writing.</p>
<p>So, next up: do the same thing with reading nonfiction books. I’ve read an absurd amount of fiction in the last year–and I allowed myself that intentionally as a kind of letdown after finishing seminary. But as I’ve noted in this space before, I don’t want to stay in that letdown mode forever. I want to build once again the habit of reading hard books carefully. The way to do it, of course, is… just to do it. Day by day, just <em>reading</em>. Hopefully in six months I’ll have a report complementary to this one, where I can say that I <em>kept writing</em> but also <em>started reading hard things again</em>.</p>
Chris KrychoTue, 10 Jul 2018 22:10:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-07-10:/2018/the-value-of-a-good-habit.htmlwritingproductivityContinuing to Reflect on My Internet Presencehttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/continuing-to-reflect-on-my-internet-presence.html<p><i class="editorial">A quick note: I drafted this back in June, but forgot to actually publish it!</i></p>
<p>I find that I’m always reflecting on the shape I want my internet presence to take. Over the last month, in particular, I’ve been thinking about the kind of “link-blogging” and commentary-on-articles-I’ve-read that I’ve experimented with pushing into Pinboard for the last <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/pick-the-right-tool-for-the-job.html">year and some change</a>.</p>
<p>On the one hand, I’ve found that Pinboard is <em>great</em> for two things:</p>
<ul>
<li>having an easy place to look up articles I’ve read but can’t necessarily remember the name of off the top of my head</li>
<li>being <em>a</em> place with its own <abbr>RSS</abbr> feed of that content, which is social-network-like in some ways but using open web tech like <abbr>RSS</abbr></li>
</ul>
<p>But what it isn’t is <em>integrated with my own site</em>, or particularly easily discoverable <em>from</em> my site. Adding a link to my public Pinboard feed would help, perhaps, but you wouldn’t know what I use it <em>for</em> from seeing that link.</p>
<p>The thing is, I want this material here on this site. There remain two blockers to me there:</p>
<ul>
<li>ease of publishing</li>
<li>site design and structure</li>
</ul>
<p>For the most part, I am happy enough with a static site generator setup. However, for this specific kind of use, I wish for a web front-end to my website (or, honestly, an easy way to integrate <a href="https://www.ulyssesapp.com">Ulysses</a> with it). The options which exist in that general space—WordPress and Ghost—both have their upsides, but also a great many downsides, and I find that I have no interest in using either.</p>
<hr />
<p>You might find that an odd commitment; here’s an aside on why.</p>
<p>Our <a href="https://krycho.com">family blog</a> is a Ghost install, and the previous iteration of this site ran on WordPress. Ghost is <em>fine</em>, and for many setups it’s actually really good. For my fairly complex set of publishing requirements, it unfortunately doesn’t really do the trick. Some of those requirements (like integration with citation-management tooling) are <em>currently</em> less pressing, but I don’t count on that being the case in the long term.</p>
<p>That said, one possible alternative here is simply to cross that bridge if or when I come to it and lean on the somewhat simpler tools that <em>do</em> meet my needs for today. If I did that, it would certainly be with Ghost, because WordPress feels to me the same way Windows feels to me: technically very competent, but impossibly frustrating to use. (That’s not insulting either of the two; it’s a statement of my very—overly, perhaps!—specific aesthetic tastes and my corresponding—admittedly irrational!—response to the experience of using Windows or WordPress. Maybe it’s just the ‘W’s that start the names?)</p>
<p>This is one reason I’ve seriously considered figuring out how to make my <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/lightning-rs">long-on-hold site generator</a> actually be a hybrid: never dynamically generating content, but with an <abbr>API</abbr> to enable programmatic access, so that I <em>can</em> put a web or app front end on it. (Existing solutions in that space, like <a href="https://www.netlifycms.org">Netlify CMS</a> or <a href="https://forestry.io/">forestry.io</a>, are really good, but don’t quite support everything I have historically committed to needing. They also don’t have anything like an iOS share sheet!)</p>
<p>The problem, of course, is that I’m not yet ready to spend my limited time building out my long-planned and long-delayed personal website generator tool. In short, I’m caught in a catch-22 of my own making.</p>
<hr />
<p>In any case, I want to figure out a flow for sharing those kinds of notes-on-articles that works better for getting it onto my blog, rather than caught in the mostly-invisible space that is my Pinboard. I need a refreshed site design to support it effectively. I need different <em>tools</em> to support that flow effectively. Which means I’m not going to end up doing it tomorrow or anything.</p>
<p>I’ll get to it eventually. Maybe. Hopefully. And in the meantime I’ll do one extra step when I see something worth linking, and copy it into a Ulysses document that I can publish shortly thereafter.</p>
<p>This is where every nerd ends up with their blogging software, I think: in a pit of good-enough-to-get-by but not-actually-satisfying. (But I’m not helping myself with how persnickety I am about these things.)</p>
Chris KrychoMon, 25 Jun 2018 06:15:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-06-25:/2018/continuing-to-reflect-on-my-internet-presence.htmlpinboardwritingbloggingGood Argumentshttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/good-arguments.html<p>I’m working my way slowly and carefully through Shannon Vallor’s <cite>Technology and the Virtues</cite> and as I put it to my friend and partner-in-<a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> Stephen Carradini: I find that I <em>very often</em> agree with Vallor on her conclusions while <em>equally often</em> disagreeing with her on how she gets there. It makes for very interesting reading, certainly; and so far, at least, I can pretty heartily commend the book despite my disagreements.</p>
<p>And the reason why I can so heartily recommend it is what I’m more interested in at the moment. Vallor is a really excellent <em>conversation partner</em>. Not all writers are. But <cite>Technology and the Virtues</cite> is the kind of book that is sufficiently well-written and well-argued<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> that the very act of disagreeing with it—if you take the time, anyway—produces light rather than merely heat.</p>
<p>A good conversation partner prompts you to think hard about the differences between her position and your own. She pushes you to articulate <em>why</em> you disagree, and whether your disagreements are well-founded, and if not to see if you <em>can</em> provide a good foundation for them. Vallor has this and in spades. I have pages of notes both agreeing with many of her points and also articulating why—as a <em>Christian</em> interested in virtue ethics—I differ sharply with her in certain areas.</p>
<p>What makes all of this valuable is that these are <em>illuminating</em> differences. I have a better sense of some of the gaps at least in my own education in Christian ethical systems.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> I have a better sense of the space in which Stephen and I are playing with Winning Slowly <a href="https://winningslowly.org/season-6.html" title="Rejecting the Inevitable Future">Season 6</a>. I have clarified my own view of the relationship of virtue and wisdom and law in meaningful ways in just the short time I’ve been working through this book—and I can feel the gears turning still in the background; there is a lot more sharpening to come from this.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
<p>When people talk about the benefits of reading those you disagree with, this is what they mean. The best interlocutors are those who push you like this—whether you agree or disagree, they make you work harder and think more sharply. Good arguments are invaluable for clear thinking and the pursuit of truth.</p>
<p>One other thing this points at is that good thinking often begets good thinking. I actively <em>want</em> to think well about these things, but I also am unable to do as well in a vacuum as I can with the help of others who are thinking hard and well about them—even, and sometimes <em>especially</em>, when we disagree.</p>
<p>One of the reasons I blog is as an attempt to think well out loud. I cannot make others think well no matter how well I think; and I certainly do not presume that my own thinking <em>is</em> always thinking well. But the act of writing, and writing publicly, is an attempt to do the kind of work (on however small a scale) that I see people like Vallor and <a href="http://blog.ayjay.org" title="Snakes and Ladders">Alan Jacobs</a> and <a href="https://stratechery.com">Ben Thompson</a> doing in their own spaces. If I can do even a fraction so well as they are in my own space, perhaps I too can help others think well. At the least, I know I am learning to think better along the way, and that is no small thing.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>These are different! Complementary, but different.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>See <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/the-chinese-room-argument.html#fn2">footnote 2 on an earlier blog post</a> for a comment on why I assume the problem is likely with <em>me</em>. It’s probable that there <em>is</em> quite a bit of specifically Christian reflection on many of these ideas; I simply haven’t encountered it. This may also say some things about the specifics of my theological education; I think it does and may return to that in a later post, but that’s neither here nor there.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>A preview:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Vallor sees virtue ethics as incommensurable with deontological accounts of ethics; I think the two are meant to complement one another. The structure of Biblical ethics is both deontological and virtuous. In particular, my read of the Wisdom literature (as well as the New Testament account of righteous life which builds upon it) is that the Biblical account sees virtue (or righteousness) and wisdom as the fruit—and I choose that word intentionally—of life lived under God’s enduring law. The moral precepts do not change; their specific applications are plurifold, and the shape of Biblical ethical reflection itself is likewise wide-ranging. Put more simply: life lived under God’s law in his power <em>yields</em> wisdom. This is not so different from Vallor’s picture of the virtue ethics of Aristotle, Confucius, or Buddha—save that wisdom in the Biblical account does not <em>supercede</em> God’s law; it comes to rightly apprehend <em>how</em> God’s ways are rightly applied in every circumstance.</p></li>
<li><p>Vallor rejects the notion of any singular account of a human <em>telos</em> or specific nature (other than what we have been given by evolution) that is capable of grounding the pursuit of virtue across all cultures. She aims for a kind of ethical pluralism that can account for the various cultural notions of human nature and <em>telos</em> without falling into ethical relativism or absolutism. I don’t think her account can actually support this weight, though. By contrast, I think Christianity <em>does</em> have the resources to support the kind of pluralism she rightly recognizes as necessary because its account of human naature and <em>telos</em> are rich enough to embrace the goods of many cultures and contexts and wisdom traditions. (That Christianity has not perfectly or even very much at all lived up to this potential is, as Vallor herself notes of her own account of virtue ethics, by no means a defeater for the claim.)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>There is much, <em>much</em> more to say here, and I will—later!<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoMon, 04 Jun 2018 10:30:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-06-04:/2018/good-arguments.htmlwritingphilosophyethicsOn Tweeting (Instead of Writing)http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/on-tweeting-instead-of-writing.html<p>I ended up spending about half an hour on Twitter this morning, a fair bit of it writing out tweets in response to things I’d bumped into. This is not a thing I do often, especially anymore. (There was a time, back in the days of App.net, when I spent a <em>lot</em> of time conversing in a Twitter-like context.) And as I was thinking on it afterwards, I realized why I don’t often do it anymore: I come away from it dissatisfied. I’d have been <em>far</em> happier working on the blog post I had started before opening Twitter (for something related to that post).</p>
<p>Twitter is an interesting medium, but I consistently find that if I attempt to have conversations on Twitter—especially about important topics—I come away frustrated with my inability to say clearly what I mean, and concerned by the very real possibility of being misunderstood by someone who has too little of the context.</p>
<p>Because Twitter is like standing in the middle of the largest party on earth and <span style="font-variant: small-caps; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">shouting at the top of your lungs</span> to the person next to you. What you’re saying might make total sense in the context of that specific conversation, and if you could explain the context would make sense to the other people in the room, and yet be open to wild and massive misinterpretation or misunderstanding. Worse, because you are <span style="font-variant: small-caps; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">shouting at the top of your lungs</span> (not to mention limited in the weirdest way to 280-character blurbs strung together into something only vaguely resembling coherence), it’s difficult to communicate well even to the person you’re talking to.</p>
<p>I wrote early this year that we should all <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/tweet-less-blog-more.html">tweet less and blog more</a> and I was reminded forcefully of that. Tweetstorms are worse than blog posts. The fact that more people are apt to interact with them is a <em>downside</em>, not an <em>upside</em>, because people are apt to interact with your least articulate, least coherent, least contextualized version of an idea, and they’re encouraged by the medium to respond to it with snappy comebacks.</p>
<p>I’m not quite at the point where I want to just get off of Twitter entirely—but I’m not far from it either. I have no longer any desire to <em>converse</em> there, and find decreasing profit in reading anything there but links to interesting essays or blog posts. I’m seriously considering using it as a write-only medium and just piping the users with the highest signal of interesting links <a href="https://feedbin.com/blog/2018/01/11/feedbin-is-the-best-way-to-read-twitter/" title="“Feedbin is the Best Way to Read Twitter”">right into my <abbr>RSS</abbr> feed</a> and having done with it.</p>
Chris KrychoThu, 03 May 2018 07:30:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-05-03:/2018/on-tweeting-instead-of-writing.htmltwittersocial mediawritingrssOn Steam (Specifically, Running Out of It)http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/on-steam-specifically-running-out-of-it.html<p>I find myself this morning almost unable to write at all, and quite unable to write what I was <em>planning</em> to be writing today. (I’ve been steadily pushing forward on <a href="https://github.com/typed-ember/ember-typings/issues/14">a big “quest”-style issue for an open source software project I help maintain</a>, and that’s how I planned to spend my writing time today.) But I’m feeling quite keenly the need of some time away from that project and indeed from a lot of the things that have had me burning the candle at both ends.</p>
<p>I’ve noted before that I <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/intentional-cyclicality.html">go in cycles</a>; one thing that I’ve also started to notice is that those cycles, unsurprisingly, include points where I’m just <em>done</em>. I’m all out of steam. And I seem to have hit one of those just this week.</p>
<p>It makes sense: since last October, as a family we’ve moved across the country; lived with my parents for three months, during which time we learned that my dad had brain cancer and helped him and my mom through the surgery, recovery, and early parts of chemo and radiation); then moved into a new house; and joined a new church.</p>
<p>On top of that I’ve personally continued working on <a href="https://newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a> and <a href="https://winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a>, helped ship the most important release of <a href="https://github.com/typed-ember/ember-cli-typescript">ember-cli-typescript</a> in the project’s history, taught a workshop on TypeScript at EmberConf, and helped kick off one of the most important front-end development projects in Olo’s history.</p>
<p>Of <em>course</em> I’m tired. Of <em>course</em> I feel like I’m just out of steam.</p>
<p>The trick, for the moment, is that there are some things I really feel I should carry to some specific points <em>before</em> I take a week or two off. Getting that quest issue that I was going to be writing this morning done, and a related <a href="https://github.com/emberjs/rfcs">Ember.js RFC</a> on the relationship of TypeScript and Ember.js, and getting the first of our beta releases for this project at Olo out the door… all of those are things that really just <em>need</em> to happen before I take that time off. After I get through those, though, I think I’m taking a week or so off. Maybe time it with Memorial Day to make it a full 10 days or something.</p>
<p>And in the meantime, I do things like write little blog posts thinking about “running out of steam” not because it’s all that important for the world to know, but because it’s a way of keeping <em>some</em> degree of forward momentum, continuing to maintain my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/momentum.html">daily writing habit</a>, and generally doing all the little things that make it possible for me to actually get across the finish line on those projects.</p>
<p>Because—weird though it may seem in some ways—even when I’m tired like it, I know through long experience that the way I actually get across those finish lines is by keeping up my forward motion. It’s very much like the feeling in the last 5k of a half marathon. (A half marathon is two five-milers and a 5k, and thinking about it that way is the way to run it effectively.)</p>
<p>Everything hurts. You don’t feel like you have anything left. But in fact, if you’ve done the right things up to that point, you <em>do</em> have enough left. The way to finish well is not only to keep putting one foot in front of the other, but also to push a little harder, and a little harder, and a little harder, until you hit the finish line. You have to watch out, of course, and not hurt yourself. That’s the trick with mental fatigue, too. Burnout is a real thing. But, as with running, if you’ve built up your mental muscles well and built up the reserves of <em>experience</em> that you need, you know the difference. You know when you need to stop early for a day and go read a novel. You know when to push through. You know when to take a day off of the quest issue and write a quirky, and not-all-that-coherent, blog post about the experience of fatigue and thinking about pushing on. And you know that you still need to finish.</p>
<p><strong>Edit (October 11, 2018):</strong> I’ve added my <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/burnout/">#burnout</a> tag to this post retroactively because I now recognize much of what I wrote here as some of the earlier symptoms of what I didn’t concretely identify until <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/some-mild-burnout.html">a bit later</a>.</p>
Chris KrychoThu, 05 Apr 2018 07:00:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-04-05:/2018/on-steam-specifically-running-out-of-it.htmlproductivitywritingopen-source softwareburnoutHow I Write a Talkhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/how-i-write-a-talk.html<p>Giving a good talk is mostly a matter of <em>writing</em> a good talk and crafting a coherent presentation of that material (with or without slides or other helpers). In this post, I’m going to briefly walk through how <em>I</em> prepare talks. This process may not work for you at <em>all</em>; sometimes I read <a href="https://css-tricks.com/talk-writing-process/">other people’s talk preparation strategies</a> and laugh because they’re so wildly different from mine. But this way there’s one more strategy documented out there.</p>
<p>The strategy is the one I’ve developed over the past few years as I’ve given a couple conference talks and a bunch more weekly tech talks at Olo.</p>
<p>While my own approach here has a couple details that are technical, the vast majority of it is applicable to any kind of talk. In fact, a <em>lot</em> of this is essentially identical to certain phases of my preparation for preaching a sermon or teaching a theology class at church.</p>
<section id="brainstorm-on-paper." class="level2">
<h2>1. Brainstorm on paper.</h2>
<p>I start by writing out a bunch of different approaches I might want to use for the talk with pen and paper. Usually I grab the <a href="https://us.moleskine.com/en/">Moleskine</a> I dedicate to writing ideas<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> and <a href="https://www.jetpens.com/Pilot-Juice-Up-Gel-Pen-0.4-mm-Blue-Black/pd/18166">my favorite pen</a> and put away everything electronic. Here I’m not worried about structure or organization at all. I just jot down the things I want to cover, what the motivating idea and main takeaway is, and any secondary points I want the audience of the talk to come away with.</p>
<p>Sometimes this is broadly obvious because I already know how to come at the talk. Sometimes it takes multiple passes to get right. And when I skip this step, things go wrong regardless. I almost gave a <em>really</em> terrible version of an important internal tech talk at Olo a month ago because I hadn’t take the time to do this, and ultimately had to push back when I delivered it by a bunch as a result!</p>
</section>
<section id="write-a-high-level-outline-and-map-out-the-overall-timing." class="level2">
<h2>2. Write a high-level outline and map out the overall timing.</h2>
<p>Once I have a good idea the way I want to tackle the subject, I write an outline—again, in my Moleskin with a pen. Once I map out the overall sections of the talk, one or two or <em>very</em> rarely three layers deep, I go through and write out how long I think each section should be. This is often the first point I have to start cutting material, because I can look at a list of eight sub-bullet points allocated to a 10-minute block and realize: <em>no, I’m probably not actually going to get through that.</em></p>
<figure>
<img src="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/emberconf-notes.jpg" title="EmberConf notes" alt="Planning and transferring notes for EmberConf" /><figcaption>Planning and transferring notes for EmberConf</figcaption>
</figure>
</section>
<section id="draft-the-talk-writing-it-out-long-form." class="level2">
<h2>3. Draft the talk, writing it out long-form.</h2>
<p>This is the longest part of the process, but it works wonders for me.</p>
<p>I start by copying the outline from my paper notebook into a <a href="https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">Markdown</a>-friendly writing environment.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> I turn each bullet point in the original outline into a heading. Then I expand the outline dramatically, from those high-level sections to slide-level sections: one sub-heading per slide. At this point I also add “breaks” between all the headings, which is how <a href="https://revealjs.com/">the web-based slides tool I use</a>.</p>
<p>Next up I script the talk in detail. I know some people just throw down bullet points here; that’s not how I work. I write out a word-by-word script for what to say. Each of those headings/slides gets anything from a sentence to a few paragraphs. As I’m doing this, I keep an eye on the word count: courtesy of having done a fair number of talks this way, and having done a <em>lot</em> of <a href="http://www.newrustacean.com">podcasting</a> this way, I have a pretty good feel for what a given number of words will come out to in terms of talk time.</p>
<p>This is also the phase where I extract bullet points, notes about images to insert, code samples, etc. Sometimes I’ll pause to write out an example in detail while working on the script; other times I’ll just leave myself a note that looks like <code>TODO: add Doctor Who "Oh yes!" GIF here</code>. <a href="http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/507/438/eeb.gif">For reference: <em>this</em> GIF.</a> The script goes behind a simple textual marker (customizable in the tool I use; usually just <code>Note:</code>) so that it doesn’t show up on the slide and instead is displayed as speaker notes.</p>
<p>The important thing for me is that writing out the talk this way lets me know what materials actually go on what slides, and it also cements the content into my mind. Once it’s written, I don’t actually try to memorize it, and I don’t read from it while delivering the talk. The act of creating it this way makes the flow of the slides flow coherently. I end up with a map to what I actually intend to say in the form of the slides themselves—so they guide me and the audience together through the content in a coherent way.</p>
<p>Once I have this full script written out, I’ll go back over it as a revision pass.</p>
</section>
<section id="do-a-dry-run-and-edit-the-talk." class="level2">
<h2>4. Do a dry-run and edit the talk.</h2>
<p>I now do at least one dry run for every conference-type talk—by myself in front of the computer if necessary, but preferably in front of at least a small audience. A dry run has two big upsides:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>I figure out whether I’m going to hit your time or not. I take this really seriously, because I think it’s incredibly rude to both the audience and (if you’re not going last) the next speaker to go over. So if I need to trim, I figure that out by doing a dry run (and probably not any other way). Even with all my practice prepping spoken materials, I still have to tweak and trim for length quite regularly.</p></li>
<li><p>I get to have a feedback cycle with the actual process of presenting the material—from yourself if nothing else, but possibly also from the audience if I have one.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>I’ve only gotten to do a dry run with an audience twice (for my Rust Belt Rust talk and for the EmberConf workshop I just gave), but it has been incredibly helpful both times. Having people give you feedback on what you’ve just presented can be slightly intimidating, but it’s way better to learn that the flow was off in an important way <em>before</em> you give a talk than <em>during</em> or <em>after</em> the presentation.</p>
<p>I write down the feedback I get in a dry run, or I take notes if I’m doing it by myself, and then I use those to update the script and slides I prepared in step 3 to resolve any issues I ran into. That often means cutting material; in the case of my EmberConf workshop it also meant completely restructuring part of the talk—moving the order of material around a <em>lot</em>. That was a lot of work, but it was also incredibly important and valuable.</p>
<p>To see this in practice, you can see the whole final content of my EmberConf 2018 workshop <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chriskrycho/emberconf-slides/master/talk.md">here</a>—you can see it’s just plain text and some special markup for certain slide transitions.</p>
</section>
<section id="repeat-step-4-until-im-happy-with-it-or-im-out-of-time." class="level2">
<h2>5. Repeat Step 4 until I’m happy with it or I’m out of time.</h2>
<p>Let’s be honest: it’s usually the latter, and in many ways that’s actually a good thing. A talk can be polished <em>ad infinitum</em> and it’s not actually helpful to polish forever. At some point the return on investment is so small relative to the time cost (which is high!) that you should just stop and give the talk.</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>or occasionally a white, narrow-ruled legal pad<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Right now that’s usually <a href="TODO">Ulysses</a>, but there are things that bother me about every such writing app I’ve ever tried—and yes, before you suggest it, that does include Emacs and Vim, along with VS Code and other programming text editors, as well as the usual plain-text writing environment apps like Ulysses.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoFri, 16 Mar 2018 20:00:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-03-16:/2018/how-i-write-a-talk.htmlwritingtalksIntentional Cyclicalityhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/intentional-cyclicality.html<p>If you look closely at my written output on this site (and indeed on all the previous incarnations of it), you’ll notice a sort of trend: repeating <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/three-month-cycles.html" title="Three Month Cycles. Or something thereabouts.">cycles</a> of substantial output, usually focused in a particular direction, followed by a period of silence and then, when I start back up, usually a different topic at the fore.</p>
<p>Over the last year, for example, you can see phases of emphasis on TypeScript and on art, phases where I wrote on a mix including productivity and on programming languages and type theory. But you can also see gaps. Nothing at all appeared here between August and November last year.</p>
<p>This morning, I was reading <a href="http://ayjay.org">Alan Jacobs</a> at his <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/">Text Patterns</a> blog (<a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2018/03/rewriting-ancient-history.html" title="Rewriting Ancient History">this post</a>, if you’re curious), and thinking on his <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2018/03/back-in-saddle.html" title="Back in the Saddle">“I’m back!”</a> post from a few days ago. Since I started reading Jacobs a few years ago, I’ve watched him go through a number of cycles: he’ll simply say “I have other things I need to do now; I have no idea if I’ll pick this specific site back up, but if I do it won’t be for a good long while!” and <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2017/09/pinboard.html" title="Redirecting to Pinboard">be on his way</a>. The site will sit dormant for the better part of a year. And then: “I’m back!” (I doubt Jacobs will ever stop blogging; he seems to find it a fruitful medium <a href="https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/on-blogging.html">for many of the same reasons I do</a>.)</p>
<p>The thought that caught my attention today is what Jacobs got up to in the meantime. My breaks tend to be forced on me by simply running out of steam or getting distracted by <a href="https://true-myth.js.org/" title="True Myth">other projects</a>. Jacobs… writes whole books ranging from the <a href="https://www.alibris.com/How-to-Think-A-Survival-Guide-for-a-World-at-Odds-Alan-Jacobs/book/38234700?matches=38" title="How to Think: A Guide for the Perplexed">popular (and important!)</a> to the <a href="https://www.alibris.com/The-Year-of-Our-Lord-1943-Christian-Humanism-in-an-Age-of-Crisis-Alan-Jacobs/book/40202620?matches=50" title="The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis">academic (and important!)</a>.</p>
<p>As to why that caught my attention so: I also read <a href="http://stephaniehurlburt.com/">Stephanie Hurlburt</a>, and <a href="http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2018/3/6/what-is-fulfillment" title="What is Fulfillment?">her most recent post</a> had me thinking on plans and goals and hopes.</p>
<p>I’ve been thinking for a while now about how I accomplish both my day-to-day goals and my longer-term aims. Some of the things I want to do are, like Hurlburt’s bigger goals listed near the end of that post, in the 5–10-year category! Accomplishing some of those kinds of things requires focus, discipline, and time. All of which together suggest the importance of recognizing that the kinds of cycles I have fallen into naturally are not bad things, but that I might be better served by letting my other goals and aims <em>directly</em> inform how much I blog (rather than its being mere incidental fallout).</p>
<p>More on this later. For now I have a <a href="https://emberconf.com/speakers.html#chris-krycho" title="EmberConf: TypeScript Up Your Ember.js App!">conference workshop</a> to finish preparing for and three New Rustacean episodes planned for the month.</p>
<hr />
<p>(Yes. I did that on purpose.)</p>
Chris KrychoTue, 06 Mar 2018 07:00:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-03-06:/2018/intentional-cyclicality.htmlwritingA Forgotten Blog Post Ideahttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/a-forgotten-blog-post-idea.html<p>One of the most frustrating things as a writer is when you have a good idea and then <em>forget it</em>. I had a thought this morning, and it was solid. But I was not in a spot where I could write it down (whether in a notebook or in <a href="http://www.bear-writer.com">Bear</a>). The frustration I feel at this is hard to express, but here I am trying.</p>
<p>It is such a frustrating experience that I <em>keenly</em> remember the experience happening to me once before—back in 2016, for a post I have not yet finished writing because I continually find it <em>beyond</em> me. And since I cannot remember today’s good idea, and haven’t finished the last good idea, I’ll just share the notes I wrote down back in March 2016 about that idea in hopes that either I will actually run with them sooner rather than later, or that the act of putting it out there in this brief form will be enough to allow me to let it go:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>American conservatives point to previous eras as if our nation were less sinful, less blemished then. It was not. It was wretched in different ways—but no less wicked than now. Centuries of slavery, and of Jim Crow, <em>are not lesser sins than today’s sexual ills.</em></p>
<p>Conservatives have too often elided these essential questions: Whose “better” past? And in what sense “better”? It may have been less sexually perverse, but how is that “better” when it entailed at the same time massive oppression of whole groups of people—especially because that oppression was so often at the hands of people claiming the name of Christ?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is a great deal to unpack there, and I continue to find it more than I am really <em>able</em> to unpack.</p>
Chris KrychoSun, 25 Feb 2018 16:00:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-02-25:/2018/a-forgotten-blog-post-idea.htmlwritingethicspoliticsAgainst Doing What Comes Naturally.http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/against-doing-what-comes-naturally.html<p>Twice, recently, I have found myself needing to start over—essentially from scratch—on something I had written. One was a tech talk for work, another my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2017-in-review-my-goals.html" title="2017 In Review: My Goals">promised</a> post on how we chose a new church after we moved across the country.</p>
<p>Both pieces suffered from an overabundance of combativeness. Or: I was kind of a jerk in the first drafts.</p>
<p>Thinking about them this morning, I noted that in both cases my tendency was to write in a posture that mixed defensiveness with hostility to an existing structure. In both cases, that hostility might actually be well-deserved—but there are times and places for everything, including polemic, and the more I (separately) chewed on both of these pieces, the more I realized that I didn’t want to have an argument. In these cases, at least, I don’t want to <em>punch</em> the views I disagree with, so much as gently nudge them out of the way while showing a more excellent way.</p>
<p>This runs up against one of my deepest-seated tendencies. I am passionate about teaching, about showing a better way, about correcting and fixing ills in the world. I also find a good argument wonderfully sharpening to the way I think—tracing out differences, finding the weaknesses in my own views and either tightening them up or abandoning them as appropriate, understanding other views more clearly… Those are good passions in many ways, but like all good passions they can go awry very easily. In my case, they can lead me to treat <em>everything</em> like an argument, and to go after everything that seems amiss to me with the same kind of knock-it-down-with-a-battering-ram approach.</p>
<p>In the last fifteen years, I have been learning <em>not</em> to verbally hammer at problems (whether in person or in writing). I have slowly learned to listen carefully and try to understand why someone holds the view they do, even when I still think their view is wrong. I have seen firsthand that people’s surface statements and their deepest-held beliefs alike often derive from experiences that are <em>not</em> obvious on the surface. Their struggles are not necessarily apparent. Their histories certainly are not.</p>
<p>I have also slowly learned that a nudge here and a nudge there can often be both more effective and—more importantly—<em>kinder</em> than trying to shove people where I think they ought to be. Even when I’m right about where they ought to be! And my judgments of such things, I have also too-slowly learned, are far less than perfect—which should temper the vigor with which I sally forth to do battle for those judgments.</p>
<p>Make no mistake: there are times for rebuke. There are times to say, “This view you hold [about software development, or Christianity, or financial practices, or whatever else]? It’s <em>dead wrong</em>.” But not all the time. Even though it’s what’s “natural” for me, even though it’s what feels right sometimes.</p>
<p>Sometimes, we have to fight our strongest instincts. No matter how natural something feels, it can be <em>wrong</em>. That is certainly so for me when I get combative about something I’m passionate about. It’s the right response… <em>occasionally</em>. Nearly all of the time, I need to be quieter, gentler, more patient, more understanding, and less interested in winning a fight.</p>
Chris KrychoThu, 22 Feb 2018 07:00:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-02-22:/2018/against-doing-what-comes-naturally.htmlethicswritingGood Work Takes Timehttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/good-work-takes-time.html<p>It’s obvious enough when you say it aloud, of course, but it bears reiterating, and often: <em>Good work takes time, and most of the time and effort behind good projects remains forever invisible.</em></p>
<p>One of the things I did in 2017 that I’m most proud of (and which I get <em>enormous</em> utility from every day at work) is building <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/true-myth">True Myth</a>, a library implementing <code>Maybe</code> and <code>Result</code> types in TypeScript.</p>
<aside>
<p>Note: if you’re about to tune out because this sounds technical, don’t. You can understand everything important in this post without understanding a thing about TypeScript or these particular types.</p>
</aside>
<p>There’s nothing <em>particularly</em> special about that library compared to any of the others in the space which already do the same thing. It makes its own <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/true-myth/blob/master/README.md#why-not" title="Comparisons with Folktale and Sanctuary">design tradeoffs</a>, which are slightly <em>different</em> from others, and it has what I think are <a href="https://true-myth.js.org">best-in-class docs</a>, but mostly it’s comparable to the others. Still, it’s <em>good</em>, and it fits that particular niche in terms of design tradeoffs pretty well in my view.</p>
<p>If you just saw the public work on that, you’d have first heard of it <em>at the earliest</em> when I pushed the first commit to GitHub on September 21, 2017. But the roots go much, much further back.</p>
<p>For one thing, I just found a related bit of work dating all the way back to January 10, 2017: an early attempt to see if I could directly reimplement Rust’s Result and Option types in TypeScript, in the early days of my adoption of TypeScript.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> That initial spike didn’t work—and I mean that literally; I didn’t yet have enough of a handle on TypeScript’s type system to get it to actually compile! But it was the first of <em>multiple</em> (mostly very brief) swings I took at it over the course of the year. The culmination of those repeated stabs at the problem was True Myth, with its polish, test coverage, and very considered design tradeoffs.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> But none of that would have happened without the better part of a year of experimenting along the way.</p>
<p>What’s more: even that January spike wasn’t the real start of True Myth. I have code in our codebase (code we’re finally mostly done replacing with True Myth!) that was an early attempt to capture these same basic ideas in plain-old JavaScript—code that dates to March 2016!</p>
<p>So: do not be discouraged when your own work seems to take a long time, or when you see others produce what seem to be fully-formed projects all in a rush. Always, our best work stands on a foundation—of ideas simmering over time, of previous attempts that got partway, of previous outright <em>failures</em>—and all of that is “underground,” out of sight.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Somewhat amusingly to me in retrospect, I’d switched from Flow to TypeScript on our codebase at Olo as my final act of 2016.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I remain convinced that we hit a <em>really</em> sweet spot with the design here: it works well as idiomatic JavaScript <em>and</em> supports nice functional idioms and I think it just feels nice to use <em>in JavaScript</em>—not just as a port of ideas from Haskell, Scala, etc.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoSat, 17 Feb 2018 18:00:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-02-17:/2018/good-work-takes-time.htmlsoftware developmentwritingethicsA Meanderhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/a-meander.html<p>This is a meander. I have a bunch of mostly-unformed thoughts, and I want to write, and the two come out here, together, in the next few minutes before I start my workday proper (because I stayed up late last night working on open source software and got up late accordingly, and so have a great deal less of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html" title="“Knowing Your Rhythms”">my normally-allocated writing time</a> available today).</p>
<hr />
<section id="section" class="level2">
<h2>1.</h2>
<p>Open-source software is a very strange place, and the dynamics of it favor those of us who already have well-paying jobs and lots of flexibility in our schedule.</p>
<p>This isn’t <em>necessarily</em> a bad thing. It means that anyone who wants to use open-source contribution as a gauge of someone’s fitness to work is making a pretty foolish decision, though: they’re inherently cutting off a whole sector—dare I say it, a whole <em>class</em>—of people who simply do not (and, barring being given a pretty surprising break, will never) have that kind of stability and flexibility.</p>
</section>
<section id="section-1" class="level2">
<h2>2.</h2>
<p>Twitter is really, <em>really</em> bad for meaningful discussion. I follow both <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/noahpinion">Noah Smith (@noahpinion)</a> and <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/lymanstoneky">Lyman Stone (@lymanstoneky)</a>, and they’re both extremely interesting follows, and they’re both clearly <em>really</em> smart and <em>really</em> well-informed, and in their off-Twitter writing they both do a good job of fairly representing others’ views and interacting with them.</p>
<p>On Twitter, their arguments are a disaster.</p>
<p>This is not specific to Smith and Stone. This is Twitter in one pair of interlocutors.</p>
<p>Seriously: stop tweeting and start blogging again, if you have an <em>argument</em> to make rather than just a pithy, one-off observation or a link to share.</p>
</section>
<section id="section-2" class="level2">
<h2>3.</h2>
<p>You can get a surprising amount of writing done in 5 minutes, if you’re willing to just word-vomit. (This whole post, start to finish, took me 12 minutes.)</p>
</section>
<section id="section-3" class="level2">
<h2>4.</h2>
<p>I need to read more poetry; more rich, good fiction; more rich, good nonfiction. I’ve read a lot of nonfiction in the last five years, but I wouldn’t call most of it <em>rich</em>. Most of it—most of my seminary reading, that is—was <em>just okay</em>; very little of it engaged deeply with thought critical of its own perspective. (Major exceptions: David Koyzis’ really excellent <em>Political Visions and Illusions</em>, Alvin Plantinga’s <em>Where the Conflict Really Lies</em>, and of course St. Athanasius’ <em>On the Incarnation</em>.)</p>
<p>But I find that my own writing is far sharper, clearer, and better when I’m drawing <em>widely</em> and from <em>deep wells</em>. Widely, because I find that too much time in the same spot overly narrows my focus, whether that is apologetics or programming languages. From deep wells because, frankly, there is too much out there which warrants nothing more than a skim <em>at most</em>.</p>
<hr />
<p>And that is all!</p>
</section>
Chris KrychoFri, 09 Feb 2018 07:00:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-02-09:/2018/a-meander.htmlwritingopen-source softwareethicsreadingliteraturePrayer Apps and Evaluating Technologyhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/prayer-apps-and-evaluating-technology.html<p>I use technology a <em>lot</em> to get after the goals I care about in my life. But over the last few years I’ve been thinking about, and I’m increasingly concerned about, the ways that we are shaped by our use of technology. We could generalize this discussion to all sorts of things, and I’m sure I will (though I’m also pretty sure you’d just be better off reading <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com" title="The Frailest Thing">L. M. Sacasas</a>, whom I’ve linked in this connection before). But for today, I want to just zoom in and think about this question specifically in the context of technologies we employ in the context of the Christian faith. (If you’re not a Christian, I suspect much of what I have to say here will still ring true, so don’t run off just yet.)</p>
<p>I’ve been using apps to manage my list of tasks to get through for a long time: first <a href="https://todoist.com">Todoist</a>, then <a href="https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus">OmniFocus</a>, and now <a href="https://culturedcode.com/things/">Things</a>. So as I’ve been wanting to develop more rigor around my prayer life, and in particular to make sure I pray for certain people and the <em>very</em> difficult circumstances they’re currently facing, it was natural to go looking for an app to manage that. And although “There’s an app for that” is no longer an Apple marketing campaign, is truer than ever it was when it <em>was</em> an Apple marketing campaign. So there are a lot of prayer apps on the App Store.</p>
<p>I snagged an app both my wife and another woman I really respect have found helpful as a tool for <em>their</em> prayer lives. And it’s been sitting there unused for a month. I launched the app once. I’ve had an item in Things for that whole time to populate it. But I haven’t.</p>
<p>The whole time the app has been sitting there on my homescreen, I’ve been stuck on this question: <em>How does this tool form me?</em></p>
<p>And this is the broader question that’s nagged at me for quite some time. How are we shaped and formed by our use of, and indeed our <em>dependence on</em>, the tools we employ to remember things, to form habits, etc.? What happens if the tool goes away? Nick Carr has written fairly extensively<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> about the effects on concentration and memory; but those merely point to a broader concern: what kind of people do we wish to form ourselves to be? And are our tools helping or hurting us in that aim? For our tools <em>do</em> form us, no less than we form them.</p>
<p>It’s not really about this (or any particular) prayer app. And I certainly don’t think it’s <em>inherently wrong</em> to use a prayer app, or anything of the sort. But it nags at me. Will I truly learn to be disciplined about prayer, or will I simply learn to be further hooked on alerts from my pocket supercomputer? If I end up praying faithfully for people, but also end up more distracted, more reliant on this little slab of metal and glass, less engaged with my family, what is the net on that? It is, at a minimum, not a clear <em>win</em>.</p>
<hr />
<p>Of course, none of these concerns are specific to prayer apps. I have been using a digital Bible for most of a decade now. I use a pomodoro timer to help my maintain my discipline and concentration throughout my work. I use <a href="http://www.bear-writer.com">Bear</a> for keeping a log of what I’ve done for work every day,<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> and for jotting down writing ideas. This very post started out that way.</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/bear-blog-idea.png" title="Bear app" alt="The note in Bear that was the germination of this blog post" /><figcaption>The note in Bear that was the germination of this blog post</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Using a digital notes app is not the same as disciplining myself to remember things. But the same concerns apply, of course, to <em>all</em> aids we employ. Using a digital notes app is not identical to using a physical notebook as a place for jotting down ideas—but they’re more similar to each other than they are to <em>not using a tool at all</em>. Both have a cost in effective, <em>active</em> memory of those ideas. On the other hand, they also have the benefit of helping us remember more ideas, and more clearly, than we would otherwise, and also of freeing us to think on and remember <em>other</em> things.</p>
<p>This also points to another of the fundamental challenges in evaluating the tools we use. We’re accustomed to thinking of many things—these days, mostly computers and computerized things—as technological and other things as sort of “natural” and “untechnological.” But of course, literally everything we do is unnatural and technological in many ways—too many to count; but for a start consider that clothing is not <em>natural</em>; it is a technology! So are books. So are forks and cups and plates. So are journals, and pencils, and pens. And those technologies all shape and form us, too.</p>
<p>Scribbling notes in a paper journal day after day will change your body and your mind; you will have calluses from holding the pen, and will know that your ideas are found in that journal. The loss of a journal filled with sketches of ideas might become a horrifying thought, because in writing down one’s ideas, one intentionally lets the paper do the work that one’s memory might have done otherwise. <em>Many</em> of those things—though by no means all—are just the same whether using a digital journal or a paper one.</p>
<p>At least in my own experience, some of the important differences include the way it feels mentally to think with a pen vs. to think with a keyboard. (I use the phrase “think with” here to emphasize what it is we’re doing either way: using the tool to help us think as well as to remember.) That difference is, so far as I can tell in considering my own thinking, not just one of <em>feel</em>, either: I write different things, in different ways, with pen and paper than I do with a keyboard. I’m a much better poet with pen and paper, for example.</p>
<p>But those differences do not void the core they share: they are memory-replacements.</p>
<hr />
<p>Not for nothing have people worried about the effects of new technologies on memory for millennia. And it is worth note: those who thought the advent of each kind of new information technology would come with costs were not wrong. Literate cultures seem inevitably to lose the power of oral recall. Members of illiterate cultures can often accomplish feats of memory that astound members of literate cultures, because they do not have books to offload their stories and histories to. The only way to keep them—and we value stories, so we <em>always</em> find a way to keep them—is to commit them to memory, and deeply. The tradeoff with books is real. The tradeoff with a physical journal is real. The tradeoff with the internet is real.</p>
<p>The question is not <em>whether</em> but <em>how</em> we will be formed by the technologies we employ—at least, unless you plan to go back to living naked, surviving off of whatever you can manage to collect with your bare hands and eat raw (fire, too, is technology, after all).</p>
<p>To narrow it further: the question is which specific shapings we find needful in our specific contexts. Perhaps, if there is a problem, it is not with a prayer app individually, or a todo app individually, or a notes app individually, but with offloading <em>all</em> of our mental tasks to a smartphone. No harm done in using a prayer app; but maybe write your to-do list on paper; and perhaps find something, anything at all, to simply <em>remember</em> to do every day.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="http://www.roughtype.com/?p=8248">Here</a>, on the smartphone, is just one of many times and places; his book <em>The Shallows</em> is perhaps the best-known and longest treatment of it.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>For my own purposes; Olo doesn’t ask anything of the sort from me; but it helps me see what I actually get done over the course of a year, and that’s pretty neat.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoFri, 26 Jan 2018 07:30:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-01-26:/2018/prayer-apps-and-evaluating-technology.htmlwritingethicsTweet less. Blog more.http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2018/tweet-less-blog-more.html<p>The other day, I <a href="https://twitter.com/chriskrycho/status/947607650484740098">tweeted</a>:<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Suggested 2018 resolution:</p>
<p>⚡️ Tweet less. Blog more. ⚡️</p>
<p>It’ll make all of our discourse better and richer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this post, I’m going to trace out how I plan to do that, in hopes that it’ll help others write (and <a href="https://twitter.com/mgattozzi/status/947694285004201984">finish</a>!) more blog posts—short posts, long posts, and everything in between. In another post (probably tomorrow or Thursday), I’ll explain <em>why</em> I think this is so important.</p>
<p>The game plan:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p><strong>Tweet less.</strong> If you’re tempted to string together more than two or <em>at most</em> three tweets… you have a blog post. Seriously! At 280 characters, if you assume a word is roughly 5 characters on average, and toss in spaces and punctuation, you’ve got 40–45 words in a tweet. Three of those is 120–130 words. Five tweets is 200–225 words.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Write down your ideas.</strong> I have a <code>#writing/ideas</code> tag in <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bear/id1016366447?mt=8" title="Bear by Shiny Frog on the App Store">Bear</a>, and new ideas I have just get thrown in there. When I have a day where I don’t have some <em>other</em> specific idea to tackle, I browse through that list and grab something that seems interesting. As an example: my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/chrome-is-not-the-standard.html">“Chrome is Not the Standard”</a> post had just been sitting in there for a couple months when I finally got around to writing it up a few weeks ago.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Be okay with being brief.</strong> I’m a wordy guy, but I think many people feel the need to write <em>much longer</em> material now than they did in the early days of blogging, precisely <em>because</em> Twitter exists. It’s as if the existence of a microblogging platform makes us feel like a 200-word post doesn’t justify its own existence. I don’t believe that: <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/momentum.html" title="Momentum">I write short posts sometimes!</a> And some of <a href="http://blog.ayjay.org">my</a> <a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/">favorite</a> <a href="https://css-tricks.com/many-ways-learn/">bloggers</a> regularly do likewise.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></p></li>
<li><p><strong>Be okay taking a while to finish.</strong> Sometimes a piece can take a few weeks (or months!) to gel. That’s okay. Keep at it. Take some of your allocated writing time and keep plugging. That’s how I finally finished <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/faithful-extension-question-human-origins/" title="“Faithful Extension and the Question of Human Origins”">this book review</a>.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>But finish things.</strong> That means: get them to a spot where you’re ready to post them (even if they’re not perfect [because they never are!]) or eventually just throw them away. Both are allowed.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Block out some time for it!</strong> The main reason for my flurry of posts of late is that <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html" title="Knowing Your Rhythms">I started writing every day before 7am</a>. And that’s a habit I’m keeping! It helps. Some days it’ll be <a href="http://www.newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a> scripts. Some days it’ll be <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/four-languages/">technical writing</a>. Some days it’ll be <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/star-wars-the-internet-and-me.html" title="Star Wars, the Internet, and Me">reflections on _Star Wars_</a>. But blocking out the time means <em>writing will happen</em>.</p></li>
</ol>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>The irony, I know!<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>This post itself is under five hundred words!<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoTue, 02 Jan 2018 06:45:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2018-01-02:/2018/tweet-less-blog-more.htmlwritingproductivity2017 in Review: Looking Forwardhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2017-in-review-looking-forward.html<p>As I do every year, I’ve been making some goals for myself for 2018. I’m breaking these down into three big categories this year, having learned from the experience of summarizing my goals for last year:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Standing aims</strong>: things that I can’t exactly check off as <em>done</em>, but which are extremely important to me.</li>
<li><strong>Goals</strong>: things I <em>can</em> mark as done.
<ul>
<li><strong>Primary:</strong> the most important of my goals—the ones I’ll count myself as having failed in some way if I don’t accomplish them over the course of the year (barring <em>major</em> unforeseen goings-on, which are, well… impossible to foresee).</li>
<li><strong>Flexible</strong>: other goals, which I’d <em>like</em> to get to, but which it won’t bother me if I don’t get to them.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<section id="standing-aims" class="level2">
<h2>Standing aims</h2>
<ul>
<li>Integrate well into our new church—including finding specific ways and places to serve regularly, joining a small group, and making some good friends.</li>
<li>Spend more, better, and more consistent time with my family.</li>
<li>Work hard at Olo.</li>
</ul>
</section>
<section id="goals" class="level2">
<h2>Goals</h2>
<section id="primary" class="level3">
<h3>Primary</h3>
<ul>
<li>Podcasting:
<ul>
<li>Ship a minimum of 3 episodes of New Rustacean per month January—October.</li>
<li>Publish Winning Slowly Season 6.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Writing:
<ul>
<li>Publish at least 4 medium-length (2,000–3,500 words) at Mere Orthodoxy.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Software:
<ul>
<li>Get ember-cli-typescript “finished”—i.e. with full support for addons and fast incremental builds.</li>
<li>Ship a <a href="https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design">responsive</a>, <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Progressive">progressive</a> version of a major application I work on.</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Read, or finish reading, the following books:
<ul>
<li><em>Resurrection and Moral Order</em>, Oliver O’Donovan (started in 2017)</li>
<li><em>Theology and the Mirror of Scripture</em>, Kevin Vanhoozer and Daniel Treier (started in 2017)</li>
<li><em>How Buildings Learn</em>, Stewart Brand (started in 2017)</li>
<li><em>City of God</em>, Augustine</li>
<li><em>The Technological Society</em>, Jacques Ellul</li>
<li><em>The Meaning of the City</em>, Jacques Ellul</li>
<li><em>The Ethics of Freedom</em>, Jacques Ellul</li>
<li><em>Blasphemy: A Radical Critique of our Technological Culture</em>, Ivan Illich</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Fitness:
<ul>
<li>Run a half marathon.</li>
<li>Finish the <a href="http://www.childrenscoloradofoundation.org/courage-classic/">Courage Classic</a> with my dad.</li>
<li>Get back to my target/healthiest weight.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
</section>
<section id="flexible" class="level3">
<h3>Flexible</h3>
<ul>
<li>Publish one essay at a larger publication (for money, if possible!).</li>
<li>Archive static versions of the prior versions of my website.</li>
<li>Improve the page load performance of this site (e.g. with progressive font-loading).</li>
<li>Make meaningful progress on <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/lightning-rs">Lightning</a> November–December.</li>
<li>Lead a book club at Olo.</li>
<li>Get up to 20 consecutive pull-ups and 100 consecutive push-ups.</li>
<li>Print hard copies of at least one year of my website archive.</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>That seems like <em>plenty</em> to go after this year. One thing that isn’t apparent here is that a fair bit of this is aimed at goals that extend past this year. There are things I want to do in the first half of my thirties if possible, of which some of these are a part. I don’t have those kinds of things written down (and when I write them down, I probably won’t publish them here!) but as I come into the broad swath of life that is just “adulthood”—not <em>young</em> adulthood or <em>old age</em>—I am increasingly mindful of the kinds of things I want to do that take more than a single year to accomplish. Some of these move the needle substantially in that direction, so hopefully I’ll get there!</p>
</section>
</section>
Chris KrychoTue, 26 Dec 2017 09:35:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-26:/2017/2017-in-review-looking-forward.htmlproductivitywritingfamilyfitnesspodcastingsoftware development2017-review2017 in Review: My Goalshttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2017-in-review-my-goals.html<p>As has been my habit for a few years now, I’m taking some time to reflect on the year as it comes to a close. Thinking about how this year went and what I accomplished, and how I would like the next year to go and what I would like to accomplish <em>then</em>, has become an important part of my life. There is value in taking stock and making plans—as long as you hold those plans loosely. And this particular set of reflections majors on holding plans loosely.</p>
<p>The best place to start seems to be with a review of my goals for 2017, set out <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html" title="2016 in Review, Part 6: Plans for 2017">here</a>. In a post later this week, I’ll write up some thoughts on what I hope to accomplish in 2018—though, as you’ll see, there are some hints of that here.</p>
<p>One other note: there are many things going on in our lives that don’t end up in these reflections—because these reflections (as I conceive them at present, at least) are about the kind of public-facing things I did this year. A blog is not a journal, even if there are some analogies between the two.</p>
<section id="major-goals" class="level2">
<h2>Major goals</h2>
<blockquote>
<ol type="1">
<li>Graduate seminary.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Done!</strong></p>
<blockquote>
<ol start="2" type="1">
<li>Spend good time with my family.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>This isn’t really a thing you can ever call <em>done</em> in a real sense; there’s always more to do. But we did it well this year, and better than any previous year. I’m looking forward to building on the foundation we laid this year as we move into 2018.</p>
<blockquote>
<ol start="3" type="1">
<li>Love our church well.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>I have much the same to say here as I do about family time. I’ll add that we did move across country and join a new church (and a new denomination!), and I expect to write at much greater length about the convictions which drove the <em>way</em> we landed on our new congregation after moving across the country.</p>
<blockquote>
<ol start="4" type="1">
<li>Work hard for Olo.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>I shipped a <em>massive</em> amount of code this year, including making some pretty significant architectural contributions for the main app I work on—laying the foundation for it to transition from being a <em>mobile</em> web application to being a <em>responsive, progressive</em> web application in 2018. I also built <a href="https://true-myth.js.org">True Myth</a> and made some pretty substantial progress on <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/typing-your-ember/" title="Typing Your Ember">TypeScript in Ember.js</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<ol start="5" type="1">
<li>Save money for a house.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Done!</strong> And, to our surprise relative to the beginning of the year, we’re moving in less than a month from now!</p>
<blockquote>
<ol start="6" type="1">
<li>Replace <a href="https://github.com/getpelican/pelican">Pelican</a> with <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/lightning-rs">Lightning</a> for this site.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done.</strong> I basically ended up putting Lightning on hold entirely this year. New Rustacean and all of the things we had to do around moving just left me with insufficient time to make any sustained progress on it.</p>
<section id="minor-goals" class="level3">
<h3>Minor goals</h3>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>publish two episodes of New Rustacean every month (of various formats—not all the full-length teaching-a-subject type)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>On average… done.</strong> But only on average. I put out a <em>lot</em> more episodes in November and December than any other month, courtesy of the <a href="http://www.newrustacean.com/show_notes/interview/rbr_2017/index.html">micro-interviews</a> I conducted at <a href="https://rust-belt-rust.com">Rust Belt Rust</a>. The rest of the year, I did publish quite a few episodes, but not nearly as many as I would have liked – more like an average of 1–1.5 each month.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>publish 16–20 episodes of Winning Slowly</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Very much <em>not</em> done.</strong> Winning Slowly did not go <em>at all</em> the way we thought this year. Our ambitions were… ambitious, given we were both planning to finish graduate degrees and knew that <em>at least</em> Stephen and possibly <em>both of us</em> would be moving across the country. Total episodes published this year: 4.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>complete a full-length sprint triathlon<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></li>
<li>run a <a href="http://cityofoaksmarathon.com" title="City of Oaks Marathon">marathon</a></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done.</strong> The spring ended up busier and, most importantly, more unpredictable schedule-wise than I hoped, and than allowed for sufficiently regular exercise as to be ready for a triathlon in the summer. And our move across the country both eliminated the final six weeks of training I would have needed for the marathon, and also left us 1,800 miles away from the marathon.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>be able to do 15 consecutive pull-ups and 100 consecutive push-ups</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not sure!</strong> I haven’t done a max set in a few months. I <em>have</em> been doing a bunch of push-ups and pull-ups since arriving in Colorado, so… maybe. I’ll edit this in a couple days after I do a max set!</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>lose ten pounds and get back down to my target weight</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Sadly, not done.</strong> I have not yet gotten a good handle on what <em>specific</em> dietary changes I’ll need to make to accomplish this goal, but the ones I tried this year didn’t do the trick. I’ll try something new in 2018.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>document all the undocumented features in Rust, and get the Rust reference all the way up to date (<a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/38643">tracking issue</a>)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done:</strong> I made a fair bit of progress at the beginning of the year, but this is a <em>mammoth</em> task. That said, it’s on my radar to try to help drive it forward (hopefully with community involvement) in 2018—it would be great for a complete and accurate reference to be part of the Rust 2019 epoch.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>finish a couple side projects (and bring in the associated money!)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Done.</strong> In particular, I fixed the last couple bugs and tightened things down in the implementation of <a href="https://holybible.com">HolyBible.com</a>. While there’s a lot—oh is there a lot!—I would do differently now (3 years after I finished the base implementation of the app), I’m really delighted that in the last six months I’ve had exactly zero bug reports.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>teach in our small group at least a half dozen times</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done, <em>but</em>…</strong> this was an intentional choice as we started into the year, because there were a couple other guys who it was more helpful to have in that role for their <em>own</em> training. I’ve taught a lot over the years, and both of those guys are going to be actively in church-planting roles in the next year or so.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>write at least one long essay for Mere Orthodoxy</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Done.</strong> I published <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/rhythms-family-worship/" title="The Rhythms of Family Worship">one essay on our family worship</a> and another (just last week), <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/faithful-extension-question-human-origins/" title="Faithful Extension and the Question of Human Origins">a book review essay</a> on William T. Cavanaugh and James K. A. Smith’s _Evolution and the Fall_.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>publish the scripts and transcripts of New Rustacean as an ebook</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done.</strong> I <em>do</em> expect to tackle this in 2018, but it just ended up not being a high priority in 2017.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>publish hard copies of the archives of my blog, in a way that mirrors the style of the site at the time it was written</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done.</strong> Same as with the New Rustacean ebook.</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>fully archive the Blogger and WordPress versions of this blog as static HTML</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Started, but incomplete.</strong> I pulled those archives down for the Blogger site, but have yet to do some systematic cleanup on the <abbr>HTML</abbr>. (This <em>might</em> actually happen by the end of the year, depending on what all I do on my week off, but as of the time I’m drafting this, it’s not done.)</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>move all the sites I host (mine and others) out of shared hosting and into a server I manage (probably Digital Ocean or Linode)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Not done.</strong> I did get a Linode server configured, on which I’m running our family blog (<a href="https://krycho.com">krycho.com</a>), and which I should pretty easily be able to use for other non-static sites going forward. Though, as I’ve thought about it over the last year and change: it’s likely I’ll split it up into a small handful, with one consisting of a kind of “shared hosting” for the various friends’ WordPress blogs I host; and one consisting of my own and my family’s sites.</p>
</section>
<section id="in-summary" class="level3">
<h3>In summary</h3>
<p>This year didn’t really go as we thought it would. A lot of that came down to finding a house plan we loved and could build on a lot that we equally loved—it shifted financial and temporal priorities alike. Add in some pretty serious family health issues in my extended family, and, well, no surprise some of my plans and goals didn’t pan out. That’s how it goes! The point of making these kinds of goals, for me, isn’t so much that I accomplish everything on my list as it is taking time to orient myself and to choose what I will and won’t <em>focus</em> on in the year ahead. And in 2017, I did focus on many of the things on this list. Some of them ended up more important than expected; others less. Interestingly and importantly, though, almost nothing I really spent my time focusing on <em>wasn’t</em> on the list. And that’s why I keep doing this year after year!</p>
</section>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>750m swim, 20km (12mi) ride, 5km (3.1mi) run<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoSun, 24 Dec 2017 17:50:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-24:/2017/2017-in-review-my-goals.htmlproductivitywritingfamilyfitnesspodcastingsoftware development2017-reviewMomentumhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/momentum.html<p>I’m now about two weeks into my new routine of writing every morning. In that time, I’ve managed to (finally!) publish a <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/faithful-extension-question-human-origins/" title="Faithful Extension and the Question of Human Origins: Cavanaugh and Smith’s Evolution and the Fall">book review</a> I had been planning to tackle (and had abortively started more than once) for months; I have written almost as many words as I have the whole rest of the year; and I published <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/chrome-is-not-the-standard.html" title="Chrome is not the Standard">one post</a> that apparently <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15980653">struck a nerve</a>. One thing that has become obvious is that <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html">my initial surmise</a> was correct: the early morning <em>is</em> the best time for me to be writing, and I get a lot of mileage out of taking anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes to get at it.</p>
<p>This little post is a reflection not just on that upside, though, but on rolling with the punches. It’s now 7:30pm, and I didn’t write at <em>all</em> this morning… because I didn’t sleep much last night. My little sister and her husband are in town with their 7-year-old and 3-week-old… and the 3-week-old, one room over from us, slept about the way 3-week-old babies tend to. Add in a 3:45am call from my wife and kids who had to <a href="http://www.kwtx.com/content/news/Fire-forces-evacuation-at-Dallas-Love-Field-465891633.html">evacuate the airport for a fire alarm</a> where they were trying to fly home from visiting family, and the need then to drive up to the airport to get them, and my normal writing block simply didn’t exist. So here I am some 13 hours later, trying to just write a <em>little</em> bit today anyway, because even after just these couple weeks I have come to value getting out some words every day. After I finish this little post, I’ll see if I can knock out another section of the New Rustacean episode I’m drafting for early January, too.</p>
<p>“Productivity” often looks like this: just a bit at a time, day after day; and doing a little even when you don’t really feel like it, just so you keep some forward motion going. Here’s to a lot of keeping-up-that-momentum in the year ahead.</p>
Chris KrychoFri, 22 Dec 2017 19:35:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-22:/2017/momentum.htmlproductivitywritingA Little Status Updatehttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/a-little-status-update.html<p>Just a little status update: I’m a few days into <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html">my new routine</a> of blocking out the time before 7am for writing projects—and so far it’s <em>amazing</em>. I’ve been able to make progress on a writing project<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> that has stymied me for months and months. Yesterday and today alike I wrote 600–700 words in roughly an hour (and words I’m relatively happy with, at that). All my previous efforts at this had come to about 600 words in total, largely in outline form, and when I’d taken a stab at it other than that I’d eventually given up and thrown away anything I’d written.</p>
<p>This is a pleasant change.</p>
<p><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/knowing-your-rhythms.html">Knowing your rhythms</a> is useful, it turns out; even more useful is taking advantage of them to actually get things done!</p>
<p>The other thing I’m noticing (as I write at about 6:45pm, in one of those “just okay” spans I mentioned in that post) is that my mind is ticking along again in what I’ve historically called “writing mode.” The idea of sitting down and knocking out a few hundred words of (admittedly self-indulgent) blogging has not seemed relaxing or fun in quite some time. But that’s changing a bit as I stretch those muscles again. I’ve drawn the analogy often enough in the past, but I’ll repeat it once more: writing is very much like exercising. The act of simply <em>doing</em> it day over day helps reopen pathways in the mind (like running down paths in the woods, perhaps?) and every day you do it makes the next day easier than it otherwise would have been.</p>
<p>So now: off to work on a New Rustacean episode script, because the juices are flowing.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>a review of William Cavanaugh and James K. A. Smith’s <em>Evolution and the Fall</em>, if you’re curious<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoWed, 13 Dec 2017 18:45:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-13:/2017/a-little-status-update.htmlwritingproductivityWhy Do I Need A Research Tool?http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/why-do-i-need-a-research-tool.html<p>For a bit of follow-up on <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/how-do-you-manage-your-research-notes.html" title="How Do You Manage Your Research Notes">this morning’s post</a>—</p>
<p>It struck me that there’s a really important thing implicit in the whole question that’s perhaps worth making explicit. That is: <em>it’s worth doing the work of capturing what you’re reading</em>, at least when it’s relevant to something you’re <em>studying</em>. This isn’t necessarily obvious, and especially if you have a good memory, you can often get by in shorter-form writing and day-to-day conversation by relying on your memory. It’ll get you <em>close enough</em> that you can say, “Oh, so-and-so says this,” or even fall back to “I wish I could remember where I read this…”</p>
<p>But when you want to do something a bit more substantive—say, a medium-length essay, or a detailed book review, much less a long-form essay or academic paper or (good grief!) a book—well, then you need a way of actually keeping track of what you’ve read and where you read it.</p>
<p>I’m in the <em>very</em> early reading phases for a research project I’d like to tackle over the next year (and possibly much longer): namely, developing at least for myself a more coherent <em>ethics of technology</em>.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> And one thing I learned in one of my largest projects at Southeastern Seminary (a summary of a variety of theological systems as represented by reading thousands of pages of introductions to them and writing about 80,000 words of summary of those pages) was the importance of taking careful notes on what I read and then being able to reference and make use of those notes later.</p>
<p>But that project also left me deeply, deeply frustrated, because nothing I tried actually satisfied me as a way of taking notes in a way I could reference later.</p>
<p>Writing quotes out by hand is laborious, and it doubles the work you have to do with that reference when you need to incorporate it into a paper or essay later: you’re often enough going to end up typing it out either way. But on the other hand, writing down a quote inscribes something into your mind in a way that tapping on a keyboard doesn’t. (This is part of why I outline every talk, teaching session, and sermon I deliver by hand!)</p>
<p>Similarly, while I’ve developed a system for marking up books in a way that’s reasonably unobtrusive but is easy to understand,<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> <em>finding</em> that markup in the text of a book has its own issues. I’ve resorted to dog-earing pages with the most important quotes and ideas in the past, but found this dissatisfying. I know some people use colored page markers, and I need to try that as an approach (though it offends my aesthetic sensibilities as much or more than dog-earing in its own way!).</p>
<p>And the inciting incident for this blog post: I was thinking as I read <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/it-might-be-impossible-for-future-historians-to-understand-our-internet/547463/" title="&quot;Future Historians Probably Won&#39;t Understand Our Internet, and That&#39;s Okay&quot;">a helpful article by Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic</a> and then saved it to pinboard that it’s a lot of <em>work</em> to do this kind of thing. But if you <em>don’t</em> do it, you’re floundering around and hoping that your memory or <a href="https://duckduckgo.com">DuckDuckGo</a> or the combination of the two will get you back to where you need to be for some or another bit of research you’re doing… and good luck with that. In my experience, the more I’ve read on a topic, the harder it can be to remember <em>exactly</em> where I read a particularly important idea.</p>
<p>So that’s <em>why</em> I’m curious about people’s research tools.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>You can see this as my following some of the same kinds of paths being worn down right now by writers and thinkers like <a href="http://blog.ayjay.org">Alan Jacobs</a> and <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/the-frailest-thing/">L. M. Sacasas</a>, and it’s certainly not <em>new</em> as a line of thinking for me—see a related post <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/theological-anthropology.html">here</a>, for example.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>I use brackets to mark off important quotes, the same way someone might use a highlighter, because I hate highlighted books myself. I’ll underline <em>especially</em> important bits. I jot comments notes in the margins. I mark places where I disagree sufficiently strongly with an “x” and where I agree sufficiently strongly with a check mark or an exclamation point. Things that are essential items in the argument of the book—i.e. things which articulate or are central to argument for the thesis of the book—I’ll mark in the margins with a star. Nothing complicated!<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoSun, 10 Dec 2017 19:35:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-10:/2017/why-do-i-need-a-research-tool.htmlwritingHow Do You Manage Your Research Notes?http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/how-do-you-manage-your-research-notes.html<p>I started thinking again today about how I want to tackle reading and writing and organizing my notes and the like. Scribbling things in journals is one good approach (though it can be hard to find things later), and organization is something of a problem—I’ve considered a notebook-per-subject approach, but the problem is that my interests are cross-disciplinary; and in any case, for <em>everyone</em>, research often includes the unexpected insight from an apparently unrelated field. So segregating things off that way seems like the kind of thing that would ultimately still just end up frustrating me.</p>
<p>Using tools like <a href="https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho/" title="my Pinboard">pinboard</a> is another approach. It’s a particularly valuable one for digital articles and the like, and it has the tag-like architecture I’ve come to think is most appropriate for organizing this kind of content. However, I haven’t yet upgraded to the full article archive mode it offers, and search-ability remains something of a bugbear for me as a result. (My lasting problem remains remembering <em>where</em> I read something specific.)</p>
<p>And bringing all the pieces together—notes scribbled in the margins of books and highlights or underlines in the same; thoughts jotted out at length in a paper journal; pinboard links; half-finished blog posts which helped me formulate ideas even if they never went anywhere—is its own task I have <em>no</em> handle on. Four and a half years of graduate education <em>exacerbated</em> the problem rather than suggesting solutions.</p>
<p>So I’m curious to hear, especially from working scholars and writers out there—into whose company I’d like to slowly grow myself in the years ahead—how in the world do you manage your research notes?</p>
Chris KrychoSun, 10 Dec 2017 10:25:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-12-10:/2017/how-do-you-manage-your-research-notes.htmlwritingThe Value of Silencehttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/the-value-of-silence.html<p>Over the past year or so, I’ve increasingly become persuaded of the importance of times of silence for clear thinking.</p>
<p>While I’ve spent the last several years listening to podcasts in much of my walking and running time, I’ve started blocking out times in which I’m <em>not</em> listening to things that way—times dedicated either to just instrumental music, or simply to silence. This goes for more than those walks and runs. I’ve also been thinking about driving time, which I likewise once filled with thought, but which in recent years I have, again, filled with podcasts.</p>
<p>I used to take <em>all</em> my runs in silence. I often drove in silence or with only instrumental music. I moved away from that somewhat in my years in North Carolina, in part because I discovered a great many podcasts I enjoyed, and in part because it was a way of sustaining mental focus when I had run the same routes too many times. Soon, it bled into my pomodoro walks and into nearly all my drives as well.</p>
<p>But much of my best thinking happened in those silences.</p>
<p>I need that space for letting my mind tease out questions and issues I’m thinking on. So: while not eliminating podcasts, I have been intentionally carving out more and more time again for silence. Pomodoro walks, runs, drives. Times when I simply listen to interesting music and think.</p>
<p>The need for silence goes beyond merely podcasts for me. I’ve continued to think about the role of Twitter in my life, the amount of time I spend looking at RSS feeds, and even my enjoyment of times in e.g. Slack communities I participate in. Twitter I have long limited strictly—it’s <a href="http://blog.ayjay.org/joe-posnanski-wises-up/">an enormous and often unproductive time sink</a>—but even RSS (which is much better for thought in nearly every way!) and healthy Slack communities can be <em>connecting</em> in ways that actually <a href="https://pinboard.in/u:ayjay/b:c7d2be58b366">inhibit deep thought</a>. We need a degree of solitude and silence to think well.</p>
<p>Thus, though each of those is often a good source of information, and I enjoy them, I am increasingly aware of the curious ways they interact with my ability to think clearly and deeply about things. And about the ways they shift the <em>arena</em> of my thinking clearly and deeply about things. Pose me a question and I’m apt to answer it, but the way I answer it in a Slack chat is different from—and often worse than—the way I’d answer it if I took the time to write it up as a blog post, and that in turn different from how I would approach it if composing a medium-length essay.</p>
<p>So I am sussing out where and how I want to draw those lines, where I want to <a href="https://thefrailestthing.com/2017/11/18/the-ethics-of-technological-mediation/">pay my attention</a>, because <a href="http://iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2015/03/79-theses-on-technology-for-disputation/">attention is indeed something we pay</a>. Fewer podcasts, less time in ephemeral media (even including blogging); more time in books and long essays and in writing itself as a means of coming to understanding. More time, indeed, scribbling notes in paper notebooks, for the ways that time spent thinking <em>and</em> disconnected from the internet shapes us. More time, when I’m writing in a digital form, with the wifi off. And hopefully, as a result, more and better thinking.</p>
Chris KrychoSun, 26 Nov 2017 19:30:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-11-26:/2017/the-value-of-silence.htmlwritingsocial mediaThe Book of F♯http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/the-book-of-f.html<p><i class=editorial>I keep my book review ratings simple—they’re either <em>required</em>, <em>recommended</em>, <em>recommended with qualifications</em>, or <em>not recommended</em>. If you want the TL;DR, this is it:</i></p>
<p><strong>Recommended With Qualifications:</strong> This book is just okay, and at this point it’s a bit outdated—but if you’re in its fairly narrow target audience, it’s a decent way to get up to speed on F#.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>The Book of F♯: Breaking Free With Managed Functional Programming</em> is a No Starch Press publication by Dave Fancher, published in 2014. I read it over the course of the last four or so months, just plugging away in my spare cycles. A couple qualifications on the short list of observations that follow:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p>I don’t have any experience whatsoever writing production F♯ (though I have <em>read</em> a fair bit of it). I am interested because it’s a functional programming language on the .NET stack—which isn’t my own personal favorite stack, but <em>is</em> the stack at Olo. If we’re going to ship functional code on the server, it’ll be in F♯.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p></li>
<li><p>I am also not a C♯ developer. As such, I’m <em>explicitly</em> not the audience of this book. As Fancher put it in the intro:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wrote this book for people like me: experienced .NET developers looking to break into functional programming while retaining the safety net of the tools and libraries they’re already using.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The net of that is that a lot of what frustrated me about the book is just a result of my not being the target audience.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Those qualifications aside, some assorted thoughts on the book:</p>
<p>First, as the intro and my above qualification suggest: this is <em>really</em> not interesting or useful as a general introduction to F♯. Throughout, it assumes a very high baseline of C♯ knowledge. In fact, the majority of the discussion of F♯, even in the section of the book which turns away from object oriented programming toward functional programming, focuses on comparing F♯ to C♯. This makes sense for the target audience, but this is <em>not</em> the book for you if you’re not a C♯ developer.</p>
<p>That said, if you <em>are</em> a C♯ developer, this could be a useful resource as you’re spinning up. It also might be a useful book to work through with a group of C♯ developers who want to learn F♯. The comparisons <em>do</em> generally work in F♯’s favor, even when doing exactly what you would be doing in the C♯, which makes it an easier “sell” in that regard.</p>
<p>Along the same lines, the book is structured as a <em>very gradual</em> introduction to functional programming ideas. Roughly the first half of the book emphasizes F♯’s object-oriented programming abilities, and only in the second half does Fancher turn to a functional style. Again, this is probably the right move given the audience, but it means the book spends a <em>lot</em> of time on kinds of F♯ you won’t actually be writing very often once you’re going. Idiomatic F♯ isn’t object-oriented. But as a way of helping someone make the transition, it’s not a bad plan: object-oriented F♯ is briefer and nicer in many ways than the exact same code in C♯. It meant that the first half of the book was completely uninteresting to <em>me</em>, though: I don’t want to write a line of object-oriented F♯.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
<p>All of this had a pretty serious downside even for existing C♯ developers, though: the book often ends up seeming like it’s sort of apologizing for or defending F♯ against an expected audience of people asking “What’s wrong with C♯?” And even though there’s a real sense in which that’s true—that <em>is</em> what a lot of the audience is asking, no doubt—it became quite annoying rhetorically.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> It’s also unnecessary: if someone is picking up a book on F♯, you can assume that they’re alredy at least a little interested in the language and what it might offer! Along those lines, I much prefer the tack taken in what I’ve seen of Scott Wlaschin’s upcoming <em>Domain Modeling Made Functional: Tackle Software Complexity with Domain-Driven Design and F♯</em> (The Pragmatic Bookshelf, expected in fall 2017)—which shows not how to do the same things as in C♯, just more briefly; but how to solve the same problems much more effectively.</p>
<p>Those problems aside, the book was… <em>fine</em>. I wouldn’t call it scintillating reading, but this kind of technical writing, especially at this length, is really hard work. Credit to Fancher for managing an introduction to an entire programming language in a relatively approachable way, and credit to him and his editors for making sure it remains lucid throughout. Still: I’d love to see the bar for programming books be higher. We need more books which are genuinely engaging in the world of programming language texts. These things are <em>interesting</em>; we don’t have to make them dry and dull! (And if you want a pretty good example of that: everything I’ve read of Edwin Brady’s <em>Type-Driven Development with Idris</em> hits the mark.)</p>
<hr />
<p>A few other observations about the language itself from reading the book.</p>
<p><strong>First,</strong> reading this highlighted a lot of strange things about F♯, all of which ultimately come down to the ways F♯’s development has been driven by concerns for interoperability with C♯. Worse, there are a lot of places where the influence of C♯ casts this shadow <em>entirely unnecessarily</em>. One particular expression of this which drove me crazy: F♯ far too often uses exceptions instead of <code>Option</code>s. It’s <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/better-off-using-exceptions.html">one thing</a> to make sure the language gracefully handle exceptions: you <em>will</em> have them coming from outside contexts. It is another entirely to design core parts of the language to throw exceptions where it doesn’t have to.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most prominent example is the <code>List.head</code> function. Its type signature is <code>'T list -&gt; 'T</code>, where I would expect it to be <code>'T list -&gt; 'T option</code>. If you call <code>List.head</code> on an empty list, you get an exception. It would make far more sense for it to return an <code>Option</code> and just give you <code>None</code> if there’s no item. Then you’re not worried about <code>try</code> expressions and the type system will actually help you! This is one of the most valuable parts of having a type system like F♯’s! I really don’t understand a lot of these decisions, not least since this isn’t for interop with C♯ collections—these are for native F♯ collections.</p>
<p><strong>Second,</strong> the use of things like computation expressions instead of type machinery has an interesting effect: it makes it simpler to read when you first encounter it, but harder to compose, build, etc.—and it’s more syntax to remember. Computation expressions just end up being a way to do “monadic” transformations, from what I can tell. But as I noted often in my discussion of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/rust-and-swift.html">Rust and Swift</a>, I profoundly prefer approaches that build on the same existing machinery—even in the surface syntax of the language—rather than constantly building new machinery. It makes it easier to deeply internalize new concepts and to <em>understand</em> the language (rather than just being able to <em>use</em>) the language. It also seems (from my admittedly limited vantage point) that computation expressions are as a result much less <em>composable</em> than actual type machinery of the sort available in other languages (Haskell, Idris, etc.).</p>
<p>Now, the tradeoff there is that adding those adds a lot of complexity both to the compiler and to the libraries people are apt to write; there’s a reason Elm has totally eschewed that kind of type machinery to date. But Elm has also refused to just add syntax around ideas like this the way F♯ has here, and it makes for a much cleaner and frankly <em>nicer</em> language.</p>
<p>And that brings me to my <strong>third and final</strong> point: I’m really glad F♯ exists, and that it’s providing a pretty good experience of functional programming on the <abbr title='Common Language Runtime'>CLR</abbr>. But—and I fully grant that a fair bit of this kind of thing is almost entirely subjective—it doesn’t <em>feel</em> good in the same way that Elm or Rust do. There is something very difficult to nail down here, but I get a vsiceral experience of joy when writing some languages and not others. Again: that will vary person to person, but I think there are things that make it more or less likely. Things that make it more likely, at least for me, include everything from self-consistency and predictability at the semantic level to the way the code lays out and flows at the visual/syntactical level.<a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a> Sadly, F♯ just doesn’t hit the right notes<a href="#fn5" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref5" role="doc-noteref"><sup>5</sup></a> for me. I’ll be much, much happier to write it than C♯ at work… but I really just want Elm and Rust and Idris to come save the day.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>I am of course writing a <em>lot</em> of functional code in our JavaScript; JavaScript is a surprisingly good language for it.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>It’s not that OOP is <em>bad</em>, exactly; it’s just that what passes for OOP in languages like C♯, Java, and yes, F♯, is relatively low utility to me—and I think OOP ideas are much more interesting and useful when applied at a systems level, e.g. in an Actor system, than at the level of individual “actors” within the system. Compare Erlang/Elixir: functional components, organized in what is arguably an <em>incredibly</em> object-oriented way.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>The temptation extends beyond this book; O’Reilly’s <em>Programming Rust</em> (Jim Blandy and Jason Orendorff) reads as the same kind of defensive introduction to Rust for C++ developers.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn4" role="doc-endnote"><p>And yes, nerds, syntax <em>does</em> matter. Try reading this sentence, nicely punctuated, and with spaces and capitalization. Now: tryreadingthissentencewithoutpunctuationorspacesorcapitalization. There may be a point after which it becomes less important, and a range of things which are equally good in an absolute sense, but it matters.<a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn5" role="doc-endnote"><p>Pun not intended, but inevitable given the language names here.<a href="#fnref5" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoFri, 21 Jul 2017 19:30:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-07-21:/2017/the-book-of-f.htmlbook-reviewsprogramming languagesfsharpwritingpedagogyA Book List!http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/a-book-list.html<p>I’ve just posted my in-progress <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017-book-list.html">2017 Book List</a>. I’ll update it with books as I finish them, and I’ll also update it with reviews (even of the “here’s a brief comment” variety) as I do them. This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for my own sake for a while, and bumping into <a href="http://tbrown.org/notes/2017/06/23/reading-and-sharing/">this post by Tim Brown</a> reminded me how much I want to be sharing what I read with other people.</p>
<p>Sometimes I get myself spun up on thinking that I need to be reviewing books with the best of them. In reality, I really just want to do like Tim says in that post (emphasis his):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I am reading and sharing ideas about what I have read, I feel like my best self. <em>I want more of that feeling.</em>… I’m wondering if acknowledging what I read, along with a substantial visual (a book cover image?) and any highlights or notes, could feel just as good as having a physical book…. Maybe I could list my piles of books here on my website, and link them to blog post entries with highlights/notes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s it exactly. So I’m going ahead and doing the work: I’m going to keep that list up to date, and I’m going to try to write and share <em>something</em> about every book I read for the rest of the year. It doesn’t have to be a lot—just a sentence or two will do in many cases. “I liked it” or “This had a lot of potential but didn’t quite measure up to it.” Something simple like <a href="https://wynnnetherland.com/reviews/to-hell-and-back-europe-1914-1949/">what Wynn Netherland does</a>, or something long and careful when it makes good sense.</p>
<p>Maybe someday I’ll be able to write one of those killer reviews that ends up changing a whole conversation, or maybe I’ll just have a bunch of interesting notes I can look back on later and be able to see what I thought about a book when I’m curious a decade later. Either way, I think it’ll be a nice win.</p>
<p>So: <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017-book-list.html">book list</a>.</p>
Chris KrychoSat, 08 Jul 2017 21:45:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-07-08:/2017/a-book-list.htmlreadingwritingFarewell, Dropboxhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/farewell-dropbox.html<p>Over the last few years, I’ve grown increasingly annoyed with Dropbox. There have been a number of fairly high-profile misbehaviors on their part—most notably, <a href="http://applehelpwriter.com/2016/07/28/revealing-dropboxs-dirty-little-security-hack/">this one</a>—and then this past week, they started sending me notifications advertising Dropbox for Business.</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/bad-dropbox.png" alt="Notification ads are the worst." /><figcaption>Notification ads are the worst.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So, as I was with Google a few years ago <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/goodbye-chrome.html" title="Goodbye, Chrome: You&#39;re just too creepy now.">when they pushed me over the edge</a>—<em>also</em> with notifications!—I’m out.</p>
<p>I don’t mind Dropbox’s wanting to have a sustainable business. To the contrary: as I often note, I’m quite willing to pay for software I use, and I currently use a number of paid services where free alternatives exist because I’d rather do that than pay for ads.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> I <em>do</em> mind when a company—<em>any</em> company—decides that building their business means mistreating their users and customers. And harassing me with notifications about a variant of their product I don’t care about certainly crosses that line. Combine that with the misbehavior <em>and</em> the fact that Dropbox has a tendency to hammer my system for no apparent reason, and, well, I’m out.</p>
<section id="transition-plans" class="level2">
<h2>Transition Plans</h2>
<section id="file-syncing" class="level3">
<h3>File syncing</h3>
<p>For basic storage and access to files across my devices, the shift will be pretty easy: I already have paid iCloud storage for backing up Photos (it’s far easier and comparably priced to all the other options, so that’s what we use). So everything I’ve <em>been</em> doing with Dropbox I’ll be doing with iCloud Drive instead. And I have <em>way</em> more overhead there with a 250GB plan that I do in my current 9GB of Dropbox storage.</p>
</section>
<section id="file-sharing" class="level3">
<h3>File sharing</h3>
<p>For things where I need to share files with other people, I’ll be using <a href="https://droplr.com">Droplr</a>. If or when I find a need to share something for a longer period of time, more often, or with more people, I’ll think about the Pro plan, but for right now the free plan will <em>more</em> than suffice for, say, sending an audio file to <a href="http://independentclauses.com">Stephen</a> for editing <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> episodes. (Also, iOS 11’s Files app <a href="https://www.imore.com/files-app" title="iOS 11&#39;s Files app FAQ">will support</a> this sharing workflow natively.)</p>
</section>
<section id="my-writing-setup" class="level3">
<h3>My writing setup</h3>
<p>Probably the <em>most</em> vexing (or at least: vexing-seeming) change here will be to my writing workflow. For a long time, I’ve made an alias pointing from a folder in Dropbox on my main machine into the clone of the <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/chriskrycho.com">Git repository</a> on that machine where I manage my website.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> That has meant that I can edit the source version of a given post anywhere at any time, with any editor that has Dropbox integration. That was a winning combo for a long time, and it’s one thing I actually <em>can’t</em> do with iCloud Drive. (I tried, and it sort of works, for a little while; but iCloud Drive doesn’t seem to expect this scenario. In its defense, it’s a weird setup.) I realized in thinking it through this evening, though: it doesn’t actually matter to me with the ways my workflow has shifted—and, perhaps just as importantly, with the way that the iOS ecosystem has shifted.</p>
<p>For one thing, there are a <em>lot</em> of options for directly editing files from Git repositories on iOS now. I don’t need to have it in Dropbox to be able to open it in any one of several <em>great</em> iOS writing environments, whether to make a quick edit or to create a post from scratch. Both <a href="https://workingcopyapp.com/">Working Copy</a> and <a href="https://git2go.com">Git2Go</a> work <em>very</em> well. But for another thing, I currently can’t <em>generate</em> the site without logging into my home machine anyway.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a> So if I need to make a tweak, well… <a href="http://www.blink.sh">Blink.sh</a> or <a href="https://www.panic.com/prompt/">Prompt</a> will let me log in remotely and do what I need to. And a little bit of Vim or Emacs will let me make any quick edits that way if I really feel I must.</p>
<p>And one side effect of realizing <em>that</em> is that I can easily enough just copy a file from iCloud storage to my site’s working directory after writing it in a writing folder in iCloud if I so desire. Sure, that’s a <em>little</em> finicky, but for the most part I won’t really need to mess with it: I can just <code>git push</code> from my iPad, <code>git pull</code> on my iMac and be ready to do whatever I need.</p>
</section>
<section id="other-apps" class="level3">
<h3>Other apps</h3>
<p>The last piece of the puzzle is the other “apps” that have made a home in my Dropbox. The reality, though, is that almost none of those actually matter to me. I don’t even look at the majority of that data, and other pieces of it —backups of GPS and heart-rate data from workouts, or copies of all my tweets from when I wanted to maintain a microblog on this site, for example—are really just needless at this point, as I have all of that data stored in <em>several</em> cloud platforms (in the case of workout data) and/or don’t care about being able to retrieve it (in the case of tweets). I can happily just shut those things down and call it a day.</p>
</section>
</section>
<section id="in-conclusion" class="level2">
<h2>In Conclusion</h2>
<p>So that’s it: goodbye Dropbox; hello other tools. (This post written from an iPad, and stored in iCloud Drive before publishing.) It’s been a long, and mostly just-fine ride, but I’m getting off here.</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Full disclosure here: I am <em>not</em> a Dropbox paying customer—though that is the fault of their perhaps overly aggressive early customer acquisition strategy. I have never <em>needed</em> to pay for Dropbox, even though I have many gigabytes stored in it, because I earned so much free storage for inviting other users early on.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19305033/why-is-putting-git-repositories-inside-of-a-dropbox-folder-not-recommended">You don’t want a Git repo sitting inside your Dropbox folder</a>, but a symlink like this works just fine: you don’t end up with the conflicts that can happen with a full repo in Dropbox.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>I’m hoping to change that a bit in two ways in the future, by having the generator live on a not-my-home-machine server and by making Lighting much easier to just drop in and use than my finicky Pelican setup currently is. But that depends on actually making Lightning, you know, <em>work</em>.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoThu, 06 Jul 2017 21:00:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-07-06:/2017/farewell-dropbox.htmlwritingworkflowWrite! app reviewhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/write-app-review.html<p>As I’ve noted in the past, I’m always <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/ulysses-byword-and-just-right.html">on the lookout</a> for top-notch writing environments. I was recently contacted by the team behind <a href="https://writeapp.co">Write!</a> and asked if I would take a look at and review their app, and I was happy to obliged. I tested the app out fairly thoroughly by doing what I normally do with my writing apps: putting together a blog post or the like. I’ve written this review from start to finish in it, across my two Mac machines. I promised the authors an unbiased review, so here we go!</p>
<section id="overview" class="level2">
<h2>Overview</h2>
<p>Write!<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> describes itself as a distraction-free text editor. It enters the market in an interesting way: the Mac offerings here are numerous, varied, and excellent. Offerings on Windows are fewer and further between, and in my experience of much lower quality. Distraction-free text editors outside the world of <em>programming</em> text editors barely exist at all on Linux, as far as I can tell.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a> Write! is cross-platform, targeting all three of these. And that, as we’ll see, <em>is</em> the story of this particular app—for good and for ill.</p>
</section>
<section id="the-good" class="level2">
<h2>The Good</h2>
<p>First, the good: the app seems to perform relatively well. Text entry, even on a fairly large document, is smooth and quick. (I imported the text of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/realism-and-antirealism.html">this ~7200-word paper</a> to test it and it didn’t stutter a bit.) Especially given the time I’m going to spend on the not-so-good below, I want to take a moment to applaud the developers for getting that right. It’s one of the most important aspects of an app like this, and any number of apps I’ve used just fall down on large documents. Everything I’ve seen here makes it seem like Write! would handle much larger documents even than that paper with aplomb.</p>
<p>The app’s main writing area looks fairly nice, and the distraction-free/full-screen mode gets out of the way readily enough. The cloud sync that comes with the app is quick and seems reliable. I’ve worked on this document across the two Macs I use, with no sync issues whatsoever. The writing area also has a (toggleable) overview of the document on the right, <em>a la</em> Sublime Text. To the left is a toggleable outline view, which lets you drill down into the structure of your document if you have multiple heading levels. And within the writing area itself, you can expand and collapse sections demarcated by headings.</p>
<p>In general, the experience of writing in the app is <em>nice</em>. Not <em>amazing</em>, but genuinely nice.</p>
</section>
<section id="the-just-okay" class="level2">
<h2>The Just Okay</h2>
<p>There’s a bit of a delay before any open tabs are hidden in that fullscreen mode, but it’s otherwise fairly typical of most “distraction-free” writing environments in that regard. The colors chosen for the light and dark writing themes are fine, but not great. Much the same is true of the typography: it’s relatively pleasant, if bland. There are a number of built-in themes, but no apparent way to customize them to be more to your liking.</p>
<p>The app also features built-in autocomplete—but I’m not really sure who the target audience is for auto-complete in this kind of environment. It’s not <em>bad</em>, per se, to have it, but it doesn’t add a lot of value for <em>writing</em> (as opposed to, say, programming), and I turned it off fairly quickly in the process of writing this review.</p>
<section id="publishing" class="level3">
<h3>Publishing</h3>
<p>The app includes some “publishing” tools. Currently it supports writing to either Write’s own site, or to Medium. Medium publishing is nice—it’s certainly the hip tool <em>du jour</em>—but you’re out of luck if you use WordPress, much less something like Ghost.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
<p>Publishing to Write! itself seems to be mostly a way of letting people see in-progress drafts. The links aren’t particularly friendly, and while they’d be easy enough to share to Facebook or Twitter or the like, they have serious downsides over any of the free blogging options out there for anything other than getting some early feedback—there’s no organizational or navigational structure available, and for that matter nothing that even ties it to your name! At a minimum, Write! should clarify what this is for.</p>
</section>
<section id="business-model" class="level3">
<h3>Business model</h3>
<p>The business model here is a curious mix: they’re selling the app at $19.95 (USD), with a year included of their custom sync solution. That sync solution is one of the things they advertise most heavily, and while I can attest that it works well, adding another, bespoke sync solution to my life is <em>not</em> on my list of things I’d like to do. It’s particularly an issue from where I stand because it doesn’t actually get me any benefits over a syncing solution using Dropbox or iCloud, both of which I’ve used extensively with other writing apps in the last few years, with no issues.</p>
<p>Add onto that the fact that the sync and future updates become an annual purchase—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Starting one year after purchase, Cloud access and maintenance updates are $4.95/yr.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>—and any of the myriad other editors look much better: they all just use a sync engine I <em>already</em> use and like, and they <em>don’t</em> have annual fees for a service I don’t care about.</p>
<p>That goes double when you consider that I’ll often do different phases of drafting a given post in different editors, depending on the kind of content and what I’m doing with it. For example, I often use <a href="https://caret.io">Caret</a> for drafting technical blog posts, but at times I’ll switch over to using <a href="https://www.sublimetext.com">Sublime Text</a>, <a href="https://atom.io">Atom</a>, or <a href="https://code.visualstudio.com">VS Code</a> for working on the details of a given code snippet. If I’m using Write’s custom sync solution, my documents don’t exist in a normal folder on my machine, so they aren’t available for that kind of easy switching and editing. Double that <em>again</em> because it also means I don’t have access to the content on my iPad—where I often use <a href="https://www.ulyssesapp.com">Ulysses</a>, <a href="http://omz-software.com/editorial/">Editorial</a>, <a href="http://1writerapp.com">1Writer</a>, or <a href="https://bywordapp.com">Byword</a> to work on posts when I’m away from my Mac. There are no upsides for <em>me</em>, as far as I can tell, to using their sync system.</p>
<p>I put this in the “just okay” section, however, because I can imagine that it <em>might</em> be nice for someone who’s not already invested in an existing sync solution. Whether or not there are enough of those people out there to support the business model—I suspect not—is a separate question to whether it’s good or bad for users in a direct sense. Again: the custom sync system works well; I just don’t know whether it’s necessary (or worth the development time that had to be spent on it).</p>
<p>As for the business model on the whole: I’m not at all opposed to paying for good apps on an ongoing basis. To the contrary, I actually <em>embrace</em> it: as a software developer myself, I recognize that there are few (if any) other sustainable business models. However, the application needs to be pretty amazing to get me to buy it in the first place, still less to justify a recurring purchase.</p>
</section>
</section>
<section id="the-bad" class="level2">
<h2>The Bad</h2>
<p>Sad to say, from my perspective—to be clear, as a long-time Mac user with <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/ulysses-byword-and-just-right.html">very high standards for my writing tools</a>—this isn’t an amazing app. In fact, <em>on macOS</em>, it’s actually a bad app in many ways.</p>
<section id="non-native-ui" class="level3">
<h3>Non-native UI</h3>
<p>First, Write’s UI looks and behaves like a Windows app. It’s built on <a href="https://www.qt.io">Qt</a>, which does support native(-looking) widgets, but the developers chose not to use them – I assume in the interest of speed of development. If you’re on Windows, that’s fine. But this app will never look remotely native on macOS,<a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a> and given the plethora of other really high quality writing apps on macOS—some of them with their own publication options!—there’s just no reason why you would pick this over one of those at that most basic level.</p>
<p>Two examples should illustrate how painfully non-native this app is visually. First, note the window action buttons in the upper right:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/write-app-review/draft.png" alt="not native windows" /><figcaption>not native windows</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These are Windows window action buttons; the normal Mac action buttons simply don’t exist! Similarly, there’s a slide-out menu that appears when you tap the hamburger in the top left:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/write-app-review/slide-out-menu.png" alt="slide out menu" /><figcaption>slide out menu</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is a reasonably nice, though not totally native-feeling, way of tackling the menu problem… on Windows. On Mac, it’s just duplicating the functionality of the normal menubar. And when I say duplicating, I mean it exactly: those menus are the same as the ones the app puts in the real menubar; there’s no reason for them to appear within the body of the app, other than that the app isn’t designed to work without them.</p>
<p>Right-click behavior is strange: instead of the normal Mac (or even Windows!) menu, they’ve supplied their own, and it’s actually its own little modal window, not a menu at all:</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/chriskrycho-com/images/write-app-review/right-click-modal.png" title="right click modal" alt="right-click modal window" /><figcaption>right-click modal window</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I definitely see the utility of the little modal, but most other apps I’ve seen with similar approaches do it on highlighting some text. That way they can leave the normal right-click menu in place, which helps keep the user comfortable in their normal workflows. That’s going to be particularly annoying if you happen to make heavy use of macOS’s services menu—I don’t use it often, but when I want it, I <em>want</em> it.</p>
</section>
<section id="keyboard-shortcuts" class="level3">
<h3>Keyboard shortcuts</h3>
<p>Similarly, a number of standard keyboard shortcuts don’t work the same way, or don’t work at all, in Write! as they do in native Mac apps. Navigation controls aren’t quite right: <kbd>⌥</kbd><kbd>→</kbd> jumps to the start of the next word instead of the end of the current word; <kbd>⌥</kbd><kbd>←</kbd> doesn’t skip over punctuation; both stop on e.g. apostrophes in Write! (they skip over them natively). Other common shortcuts are bound to the wrong things: <kbd>Shift</kbd><kbd>⌥</kbd><kbd>-</kbd>, for example, increases heading size instead of inserting an em dash. <kbd>⌘</kbd><kbd>Delete</kbd> doesn’t do anything; neither do <kbd>^</kbd><kbd>⌘</kbd><kbd>Space</kbd>, (normally used for bringing up the special-character selector) or my beloved <kbd>^</kbd><kbd>K</kbd> (“kill to end of line”) or <kbd>^</kbd><kbd>T</kbd> ("transpose characters around cursor) combos.<a href="#fn5" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref5" role="doc-noteref"><sup>5</sup></a> I imagine the list is longer; that’s just what I noticed in the course of writing this review!</p>
<p>Most egregiously, Write! steals the keyboard shortcut <kbd>⌘</kbd><kbd>`</kbd>, normally used to switch between windows on macOS, to focus itself. Failing to implement and indeed overriding text input commands is one (very bad) thing; this is another kind of failure entirely. Apps should <em>never</em> override core system behavior with their shortcuts! The fact that you can customize them doesn’t make this better; and the one time I <em>tried</em> to customize it (to turn off stealing the switch-window shortcut) it ended up overriding the <kbd>A</kbd> key’s behavior to create new documents instead of to, well, enter the letter “a”.</p>
<p>A lot of apps get some of those more obscure ones wrong, sadly, but proper use of <a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coretext">Core Text</a> is a <em>must</em> for a native app in my book—and missing those super common ones is a big no-no. I simply won’t use an app long term that doesn’t do that, because I find the mismatch between the rest of the OS (and my muscle memory!) and what the apps do too frustrating.</p>
</section>
<section id="markdown-support" class="level3">
<h3>Markdown support</h3>
<p>The app claims Markdown support, and it <em>sort of</em> has it. But the goal is clearly to have a rich-text editing experience which can translate Markdown into whatever the underlying format is on the fly, and then export it back out when desired—<em>not</em> to be a Markdown writing application. You can see direct evidence that this is their approach by writing in Markdown and e.g. creating italics with * characters. When you view the exported Markdown, it’ll be using _ characters instead. Other little things flag it up equally: Markdown items don’t get converted to their rich text implementations unless you add a space or some punctuation after typing them; if you go back and wrap words in link syntax, for example, or try to make it bold with a pair of *s, it won’t be converted at all. The export still works fine in that case,<a href="#fn6" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref6" role="doc-noteref"><sup>6</sup></a> but it certainly doesn’t come off well for the writing experience in the app, inconsistent as it is.</p>
<p>It also doesn’t support Markdown itself fully or properly. Inline backtick characters (`) don’t generate inline code snippets. Instead, they generate standalone code blocks, as if using the usual four-space-indent or triple-backtick markers for code blocks in the actual Markdown spec and as supported in other apps. Nor can I find a way to insert hrules/divisions with triple-stars or triple-dashes.</p>
</section>
<section id="other-nits" class="level3">
<h3>Other nits</h3>
<p>There are a few other small but significant problems as well. One is related to the business model: you actually have to sign in to start using the app. Granted all my positive comments about subscriptions above, it’s still the case that needing to sign in to a <em>writing</em> app (especially just to use the app for local documents!) is a non-starter for me. As with so many of the other negatives I noted, this is a compromise that I don’t need to make, because the other alternatives don’t force it on me.</p>
<p>There are also a bunch of basically rough edges. Pasting with <kbd>⌘</kbd><kbd>V</kbd> does indeed paste the text… and scrolls you to the top of the current document every time. A number of times, the selection of a given option failed: it simply wouldn’t stick. Other times, especially when selecting the default text theme, cursor selection seemed broken. I’m not sure whether those are problems with the Qt engine, the implementation, or some of both, but again: not a good look, especially in a crowded market. Right-clicking, beyond the problems mentioned above, also just wouldn’t work consistently. Sometimes I would right-click and the menu would close immediately so you couldn’t take any actions in it at all—probably a result of using a modal instead of a normal menu there. Regardless of the reason, it was frustrating.</p>
<p>Last but not least, the app is unsigned, which means that it literally won’t open by default on macOS as of a few versions back. Users can certainly get around that, but they shouldn’t <em>have</em> to: there’s no excuse for not signing a paid app for macOS (or Windows! But I’m not sure what its status is there) in 2017.</p>
</section>
</section>
<section id="conclusion" class="level2">
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>This is an interesting approach for an editor. Trying to build a truly cross-platform app, and especially one that isn’t using web technologies like <a href="https://electron.atom.io">Electron</a>, is an admirable goal—in fact, it’s one that I may dare to tackle myself at some point. Cross-platform UI is also a very hard problem, and unfortunately this app makes clear just how difficult it is by falling down so often on really important details. In reality, the only way to do it well is to write all your core business logic in a way you can share and then supply actually-native user interfaces. Anything else will inevitably feel out of place at best.</p>
<p>As a result, Write! is deeply compromised as a Mac app, to the extent that I simply cannot recommend it for Mac users. If you’re on a Mac, you should look instead at <a href="https://www.ulyssesapp.com">Ulysses</a>, <a href="https://bywordapp.com">Byword</a>, and <a href="https://caret.io">Caret</a>. All of them feel much more native, and though they have different strengths and weaknesses, they’re all native (or mostly-very-effectively native-acting, in Caret’s case) apps. That doesn’t mean Write! is <em>bad</em>; it just means it’s not worth your time (a) if you’re on a Mac or (b) if you really care about standard Markdown behaviors.</p>
<p>As noted, though, the developers got some important parts of this <em>very</em> right: the app performs well, it looks decent on Windows, and their sync engine seems incredibly solid. Accordingly, if you’re on Windows, and don’t already have a particular commitment to Markdown proper, I might even cautiously recommend it—as a replacement for something like the old <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8621">LiveWriter</a> app, for example. The biggest hesitation I’d have there is the business model—and, as noted above, I’m not opposed in principle to subscription models for good apps; but I’m not really sure what the value proposition here is.</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Yes, the app is named “Write!” – not “Write”. It’s not my favorite, not least because it means you have to type an exclamation point every time you write (!) it.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>There are many reasons for that, including things to do with many Linux users’ antipathy toward paid or non-open software, which makes it very difficult for not only developers but especially <em>designers</em> to make a living. Never mind the incredibly small size of the audience by comparison.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>And who knows if Medium will still be around in five years? But that’s for another post another time.<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn4" role="doc-endnote"><p>Or Linux, but then what exactly <em>is</em> native on Linux anyway? 😏 More seriously, this will look out of place on <em>any</em> Linux desktop environment.<a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn5" role="doc-endnote"><p>These latter ones are sadly too often the case for cross-platform tech; I’ve filed issues on <a href="https://code.visualstudio.com">VS Code</a> and <a href="https://atom.io">Atom</a> in the past that way.<a href="#fnref5" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn6" role="doc-endnote"><p>I’ll actually give Write! one point over Ulysses here: Ulysses does some similar conversions under the hood to make the writing experience seem snazzier, and things which don’t get turned into their custom “text objects” can end up exported <em>very</em> strangely.<a href="#fnref6" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoMon, 26 Jun 2017 21:15:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-06-26:/2017/write-app-review.htmlapp reviewswritingdesignmacOSWindowsOn Decompressionhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/on-decompression.html<p>I’ve been thinking about reading plans and book lists. And about rest.</p>
<p>Plans and lists may not sound like rest to you; that’s fine: they don’t to me, either. I’ve been eager to move back into the kinds of reading I’m actively interested in doing now that I’m done with my seminary degree. But one of the challenges is that I need—and I’m <em>very</em> aware of this need—to decompress a bit.</p>
<p>The last roughly 8 years have been <em>going</em> fairly constantly. I began my first job after college the day after Jaimie and I got back from our honeymoon. For the next two years I worked full-time there <em>and</em> taught myself web development and then did 8–10 hours a week of web development consulting on the side while she finished school. I kept up that pace for another year and a half after that other than a slight break just after Ellie was born, and then we moved to North Carolina for me to get an M. Div. from <a href="http://www.sebts.edu">SEBTS</a>. Since we moved here, I’ve always been working—anywhere from 20 to 60 hours a week, always in at least one class a semester and often as many as three. All along the way, I’ve also been reading and writing for myself: these things are relaxing for me. And for the sheer joy and need of a good outlet, I added podcasting along the way as a hobby.</p>
<p>But the takeaway of all of that is that I’ve had to be <em>extremely</em> structured and disciplined with my time. I have always had a detailed schedule and an idea of what I wanted or needed to be working on at any given time: from learning new things in software to writing blog posts, and from actually programming as a job to writing papers for seminary.</p>
<p>It’s time to breathe a bit.</p>
<p>I feel very keenly the need to <em>decompress</em>. Not to stop doing things, but to add some slack to the schedule, to keep my number of hard external commitments low and to keep any self-imposed pressures low as well. That will let me recharge and avoid burnout, and it will give me lots of good time to just hang out with Jaimie and our little girls. We’ve made space for the family all the way through, but it has always been a matter of scheduling it and fitting it in. I’m looking forward to a season where it’s just normal for us to play and read and do life together. As I said: a kind of decompression, letting things stretch back out a bit and decreasing the tension of always being on a tight schedule.</p>
<p>That means that until about January 2018, I am not making myself a <em>reading list</em> in the way I want to in the future. Why do I even want that? Because I <em>need</em> it. So the better question is: why do I think I need a reading list or a plan?</p>
<p>I’m a voracious, multi-disciplinary reader, but this has two problems. One is I can be a bit like a squirrel: always seeing something shiny in that new subject <em>over there</em>. The other is that I can get sucked incredibly deep into one genre so that I end up reading only theology or programming or the like for six months. Having a plan and a reading list will help me both dig deeply and in focused ways into the subjects on which I want to think (and write!) more, but it will also help me balance that with a good mix of other kinds of reading from other fields—something which is both broadly helpful and which inevitably <a href="http://2012-2013.chriskrycho.com/art/and-the-stew-tastes-good/">produces a better mix of insights</a> than just reading one subject in isolation does.</p>
<p>But, for all the reasons outlined above: not now.</p>
<p>I still have books I want to read over the rest of this year. The list right now looks like this:</p>
<ul>
<li>Fyodor Dostoevsky, <em>The Idiot</em></li>
<li>Daniel Kahneman, <em>Thinking, Fast and Slow</em></li>
<li>Oliver O’Donovan, <em>Resurrection and Moral Order</em></li>
<li>Brandon Sanderson, the various sequels to <em>Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians</em> (which I read and quite enjoyed last month)</li>
<li>Charles Taylor, <em>A Secular Age</em></li>
<li>J. R. R. Tolkien, <em>Beren and Lúthien</em></li>
</ul>
<p>That’s a “list,” but it’s a list composed of exactly one kind of book: whatever I feel like reading. There are other books I’ve already started that aren’t on that list because while they’re important to me, they’re not decompressive at all: they feel like work, like pressure. And what I and my family need right now—especially in the midst of planning a cross-country move to be nearer our families in a new home!—is to relieve pressure, not add more.</p>
<p>So now I’m going to go read one of those books on our porch. Whichever one I feel like. And then I’ll read whichever one I feel like <em>next</em>. And if the list changes, that’s fine too.</p>
<hr />
<p><i class="editorial">Note: I cross-posted this to <a href="http://krycho.com">our new family blog</a>!</i></p>
Chris KrychoSat, 10 Jun 2017 10:00:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-06-10:/2017/on-decompression.htmlreadingwritingrestOn Public (Theological) Historieshttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/on-public-theological-histories.html<p>Over the past decade—yes, a full decade, and more at this point—I have been blogging about theology. That means that at this point I have over a decade of theological thought “on record” as it were. You can look at things I wrote in 2006 and have some idea where I landed on many a theological issue, and for that matter in my slow maturation in my faith.</p>
<p>I am increasingly unsure about the tradeoffs that go with this. Being able to trace someone’s theological and personal trajectory has its upsides, in the case of significant theological figures. But I am not a significant theological figure, and even to speculate that someday I might be seems hubristic in the extreme.</p>
<p>Many of the things I have written have a great deal of standing in the eyes of Google and other search engines: they are old, have various links which point their way, and in several cases are one of only a few posts (or posts still up) on a given book. I feel—and feel the more keenly the further distant from their writing I get—the weight of responsibility for those words. They are public and they have some influence (even if small); if I mislead by leaving them online, that certainly outweighs whatever “benefit” I or someone else might find in their being online.</p>
<p>I have written and talked before about the problems of link-rot, and those problems are real. But there is also this: link-rot is a problem for content of <em>significance</em>, of <em>importance</em>. Even granting that what is significant or important to one person may be very different from what is significant or important to another, much of what I have written online certainly is neither significant nor important. Would it be so bad a thing for some random ramble—<a href="http://blog.chriskrycho.com/2007/01/dangerous-obsessions.html">this one</a>, say, from a decade ago—to go away? No. It wouldn’t.</p>
<p>Two things occur to me here:</p>
<p><strong>First</strong>, if things are worth saving, they are likely worth saving in a form that is not merely digital. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb" title="&quot;The Cobweb: Can the Internet be Archived? by Jill Lepore&quot;">Excellent</a> as the work of the <a href="https://archive.org">Internet Archive</a> is, and diligently as any individual may work at preserving their own content (as I have to date), things do break. If Blogger shuts down, I will have archives of my old site, but if in some horrible event my machine and all its backups <em>also</em> failed… well, that content would be lost. Things truly worth keeping are probably worth keeping physically.</p>
<p>This highlights another reality, though: when you start to consider what, exactly, you consider valuable enough to <em>print</em>, you start to realize how little of value is on a website like my old blogs. That’s not to say they didn’t have value of all sorts when I originally wrote them—perhaps they did and perhaps they didn’t—but if, a decade on, you can’t see a reason to keep them around in hard copy, you might well wonder if there’s a reason to keep them around at all. More and more, I think the answer is probably <em>no</em>.</p>
<p><strong>Second</strong>, there is no reason to make this an all-or-nothing affair. There <em>are</em> things in the murky depths of my web history I’d like to keep around—book reviews, mostly, but also perhaps a few other relatively high-traffic posts with which I still largely agree, or others with which I now disagree but which that is useful to me in some way. For example, I can readily enough think of times when it might actually be helpful to me at times to be able to point to two different posts from different times in my intellectual development and say: I was <em>wrong</em> here and I now think <em>this</em> instead.</p>
<p>But what this points to is not the need for universal preservation, for holding on for dear life to everything I have published online. Rather, it suggests that <em>curation</em> is valuable. Or, to use a word we might have used in an earlier time with a less haphazard and hyper-individualized approach to publishing: <em>editing</em> is valuable. In this case, that editorial work might simply be my own culling and deciding what to keep and what not to. But the more material I generate, the more valuable I think that kind of trimming is. With it comes the work of figuring out to present that kind of “archival” material—what qualifiers to prepend to it, for example, and where on the site it should live, and how to make sure that links still work even if I move the actual content around on the site… in short, doing this well is a lot of work. But more and more I think: do that work, or shut it all down. There’s too much noise as it is.</p>
<p>So then, as I have suggested before:<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> I need to print these things (if only for my own long-term curiosity). And then, as I have not suggested before: I need to throw some things away, as well.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Ironically, given the content of this post: perhaps only in a microblog post I am apt to delete entirely from my site in short order.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoSun, 07 May 2017 21:15:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-05-07:/2017/on-public-theological-histories.htmlwritingOdd Bits and the Occasional Long-Form Essayhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/odd-bits-and-the-occasional-long-form-essay.html<p>In the midst of congratulating me on finishing up my M. Div. classwork a few weeks ago, an acquaintance noted—as a joke, but with more than a kernel of truth to it—that he was looking forward to <em>even more</em> podcasting and more blogging from me, what with my freer schedule. I laughed and agreed: no doubt I will have a bit more time for both (though I don’t currently plan to add any more podcasts to the already long list).</p>
<p>But one of the things I’m considering carefully is what <em>theological blogging</em> will look like for me now, and in the years ahead. Most of the theological content on this site in the past four years has come directly out of my coursework. (Click into the <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/theology/">Theology section</a> of the site and see how many items are tagged <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/sebts/">#sebts</a>. It’s <em>most</em> of them.) My theological writing before that (<a href="http://2012-2013.chriskrycho.com/theology/">here</a> and <a href="http://blog.chriskrycho.com">here</a>) was largely a mix of the <em>exploratory</em>, the <em>explanatory</em>, and the <em>response-to-current-events</em> kinds of blogging.</p>
<p>In the exploratory category, I was working out my thoughts on given topics in public. My <a href="http://2012-2013.chriskrycho.com/theology/topics/devotions/">personal devotions</a> posts back in 2013 fit well here: these were basically reflecting “out loud” on whatever I was studying in the Bible any given day. In the <em>explanatory</em> category, I was laying out how I’d already come to think on a given topic, in the hopes it would be helpful to others. <a href="http://2012-2013.chriskrycho.com/theology/will-of-god/">This post from 2013</a> and <a href="http://blog.chriskrycho.com/2010/11/debt-and-dogged-discipline.html">this post from 2010</a> are both good examples of that. My <a href="http://2012-2013.chriskrycho.com/theology/category/articles/reviews/">book reviews</a> fit somewhere else in that mix, too—a bit of both of those, probably. And finally there were the (even then rather rare for me) <a href="http://2012-2013.chriskrycho.com/theology/an-aspen-in-a-forest-of-pines/">responses to other articles</a> out there. All of those are a good kind of blogging.</p>
<p>The problem is that I’m not particularly sure I want to be doing any of them quite like I was three to five years ago—and I’m <em>quite</em> sure I don’t want to be doing it like I was ten years ago!</p>
<p>In the last few years, I’ve found my voice as a technical writer. I know that I can site down and work out even a fairly complicated subject in software in a voice that is approachable and engaging, and which people seem to enjoy reading. But at the same time, I’ve “lost” my voice as a theological writer, though <em>lost</em> is the wrong word for it. It’s not so much that I couldn’t write the way I did a few years ago, but that I don’t want to. I’m glad for people doing that kind of casual blogging, and I still read a few of those blogs (mostly by friends). But I mostly quit reading <a href="https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/justintaylor">Justin Taylor</a> or <a href="https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/kevindeyoung">Kevin DeYoung</a> or <a href="https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/thabitianyabwile/">Thabiti Anyabwile</a><a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> or any of the others I read regularly a few years ago—they’re generally publishing good material, and I think they’re a gift to evangelicals. But very little of what they’re saying is particularly interesting to me at this point. They’re doing great topical work. I’m much more interested in looking at structural and systems-level questions, or at things which really can’t be addressed well in the 500–2,000-word range, but require a long essay at a minimum or even a book to tease out the nuances of. I was starting to feel that way a few years ago; and my experiences in seminary have (in ways that might not be exactly what you expect of a seminary experience<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a>) sharpened that profoundly.</p>
<p>I do want to <em>write</em> on things theological, whether those be theology proper, or theological anthropology, or the ways those press out into ethics and culture and politics and family life and so on. But not so much in the regular-blogger-tackling-current-issues way. People are doing that, and doing it well. Go read <a href="http://blogs.mereorthodoxy.com/matthewloftus/">Matthew Loftus</a> or <a href="http://blogs.mereorthodoxy.com/samuel/">Samuel James</a> over at Mere O; read <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com">Alan Jacobs</a>—<em>please</em> read Alan Jacobs—read anyone you find helpful along those lines. It just won’t be me. I’m far more interested in essays than in blog posts at this point in this space.</p>
<p>As such, what I’m going to be doing here, I expect, will be more in the “thinking out loud about topics I’m chewing on” vein. Snippets, not long blog posts—but perhaps pieces of things on the way to being full-blown essays. I’m thinking hard about something I’m calling “algorithmism” (you can follow the bits I’m reading online on that subject <a href="http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:chriskrycho/t:algorithmism/">via Pinboard</a>). Don’t expect regularity, and certainly don’t expect hot takes or even commentary on what is current. Odd bits and the occasional long-form essay are more likely to make appearances here.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>All of whom, amusingly enough, ended up at <a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org">The Gospel Coalition</a>. Another thing which has changed in the last five years is that indie bloggers are even <em>more</em> rare; the move away from individual sites and toward blogging networks which was hitting when I started seminary has turned into a <em>de facto</em> standard.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>It’s <em>not</em> because SEBTS was an incredibly academic school which turned me into an overly-academically-minded person. Perhaps I’ll write on that more in the future, but it’s totally ancillary to this post.<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoSun, 02 Apr 2017 15:30:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-04-02:/2017/odd-bits-and-the-occasional-long-form-essay.htmlwritingPick the Right Tool for the Jobhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/pick-the-right-tool-for-the-job.html<p>Over the past few years, I’ve been experimenting with publishing microblog posts here on my website as the “canonical” source for them, inspired by some of Manton Reece’s <a href="http://www.manton.org/2014/09/owning-the-microblog.html">early experiments</a> that way. I have also spent a considerable amount of time trying to come up with a good way to share links, and have been rather stymied by the limitations of the static site generator I use (<a href="https://blog.getpelican.com/">Pelican</a>): it does not support customizing the link target of RSS items.</p>
<p>Both of these desires, combined with the breadth of my interests, have been motivating factors in my desire to <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/lightning-rs/">build my own CMS/site generator</a>.</p>
<p>But as of today, I think I am setting aside those two needs, at least for the present (though the underlying information architecture needs for my site are not thereby particularly diminished, so Lightning will still aim for roughly the same goals when i get back to it).</p>
<p>My reasoning here is two-fold.</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p>The simple reality is that the vast majority of my microblogging has zero historical value. It is ephemeral; archiving it is essentially a useless gesture, a “because I can” or perhaps “the internet should be permanent” act of defiance. But in truth, if every one of my tweets vanished… it would not matter one whit. I have been considering this for some time, but it came home to me tonight while considering my second point:</p></li>
<li><p>I have been experimenting with <a href="https://pinboard.in">Pinboard</a> as a bookmark management service over the past few weeks, spurred on by yet once more needing to dig out if an email from three years ago a particular post. (You can see my public bookmarks <a href="https://pinboard.in/u:chriskrycho">here</a>. It’s a work in progress as far as organization goes.) One lovely Pinboard feature (and there are <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2016/07/happy-birthday-pinboard.html">many others,</a> including <a href="https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/">having a simple, profitable business model</a>! Yes, that <em>is</em> a feature as far as I am concerned) is the option of public RSS feeds for publicly-bookmarked items by author, by tag, etc. This is actually what led me to Pinboard in the first place (thanks, <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2011/05/pinboard.html">ayjay</a>). My Pinboard RSS feed is <a href="http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:chriskrycho/">http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:chriskrycho/</a>, and if you want to follow along and see what I think is worth reading with occasional comments… that’s where it will be.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>In the course of writing this post, I also remembered that last night, App.net shut down. I downloaded my archive a few weeks ago… I think. Honestly, I don’t recall, and the truth is that I haven’t looked at old posts there in years, though I amassed some 15,000 in the years I was active there. ADN was beautiful and wonderful. But even the very good conversations I had there are <em>past</em> in much the same way a conversation when physically present with each other would be. We do not suppose we need audio/video recordings of conversations just in case we might want to search them later. I understand why someone might want to <a href="http://www.manton.org/2017/03/app-net-archive.html">archive all of ADN</a>. But I don’t feel that desire myself anymore.</p>
<p>Archival has value. But its value is not ultimate, and its value is not universal.</p>
<p>The somewhat-ephemeral things I care about archiving are, I find, <em>links</em>—not random thoughts or comments or even conversations, but articles and posts I want to be able to come back to later, or quickly find to share with someone.</p>
<p>So no more microblog posts here. If you want them, you can follow me on Twitter. (If I hear from enough people who would prefer to keep getting them via RSS, I will think about setting up some sort of automated RSS mirror of my stream.) But for my own part, I am content to let the ephemeral be ephemeral. And that is easier to countenance now that microblogging isn’t also a poor-man’s bookmarking tool for me.</p>
<p>This takes me around to the meta point I had in mind when I started the post: use tools for what they’re good at and don’t try to force them into roles they’re not well-suited for. Twitter is good for ephemera, bad for permanence, decent for finding content I wouldn’t encounter via RSS, horrible for conversation or substantive commentary. Pinboard is great for bookmarking things, for sharing links via RSS, and for seeing what bookmarks others are sharing; but it is not at all “social” in the modern sense, with no facilities for discussion or interaction other than reading others’ links and copying them to your own board. Twotter for ephemera and trivial conversations. Pinboard for links. Blog for longer content.</p>
Chris KrychoFri, 17 Mar 2017 22:00:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-03-17:/2017/pick-the-right-tool-for-the-job.htmlwritingWhere Do I File This?http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/where-do-i-file-this.html<p>I want to write more. Blogging does me good. <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/a-few-theses-on-blogging.html" title="A Few Theses on Blogging">I say this</a> often, but I’m finally coming to a point where it might be a bit more doable. Finishing my M. Div. is giving me more time, and that’s <em>really</em> wonderful. The trick now is deciding which of the many things I want to do will get my attention. I can split my focus a thousand ways, or I can pick a few tasks and zero in on them and aim to be good at them.</p>
<p>In the case of blogging, I have no doubt it’s something I want to continue. But I need to think about <em>how</em> and <em>why</em> I want to use it, and this relates closely to some of my goals for an information architecture-level restructuring of the site I want to do when I finish building <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/lightning-rs">lightning-rs</a>. <em>Blogging</em>, at its best, isn’t long-form articles (though there is certainly room for those on my website as a whole), but <a href="http://blogs.mereorthodoxy.com/samuel/2017/02/17/4-requests-young-evangelical-writers/" title="4 Requests to Young Evangelical Writers">short, cogent pieces which pack a punch and move on</a>, or <a href="http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2017/01/those-darn-millennials.html" title="those darn millennials?">thinking out loud</a>. Even in my own experience, the best <em>blog posts</em> I have written are quite different from the best <em>essays</em> I have written. Embracing that seems like a helpful first step.</p>
<p>I have more than a few large project-style blog posts I have not finished—most regrettably, at present, one about podcasting which I told a friend I was working on some weeks ago—in part because I have tried to treat them like blog posts <em>and</em> essays or projects at the same time.</p>
<p>What I think I’d like to end up with is <em>something</em> like this, in terms of structure in the new site:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Journal</strong>—something like a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book">“commonplace journal”</a>, but shared publicly. This would include several kinds of content:
<ul>
<li>blog posts—things like this little piece, of course, but also the <em>vast</em> majority of the content I put on the site</li>
<li>links to <em>other</em> blog posts</li>
</ul></li>
<li><strong>Projects <em>&amp;</em> Series</strong>—the home for more substantive chunks of content
<ul>
<li>long-running series like my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/rust-and-swift.html">Rust and Swift</a> posts, which are not particularly <em>bloggy</em> (for lack of a better word)</li>
<li>things like my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">2016 in Review</a> series</li>
<li>some projects more like some of the things <a href="http://craigmod.com">Craig Mod</a> has done over the years: curated collections of materials that complement each other</li>
</ul></li>
<li><strong>Articles</strong>—call this aspirational; if or when I have things published in a more formal way, I’d like them to have a home on my website as well</li>
</ul>
<p>This structure has some challenges of its own, of course. Where does a poem go? Is it part of my “journal” or is it more of a one-off “project”? And within those, I shall want both overlapping “categories” as well as cross-cutting “subjects”: it is impossible to cleanly separate <em>all</em> of my Tech and Theology writing from each other, yet having <em>some</em> high-level categories grows increasingly important for navigating the site as its content grows. (This becomes a problem even just for me as I look for old posts to link them—much less for any <em>other</em> reader of my site!)</p>
<p>Part of the problem with all such taxonomies is that they are arbitrary and constrictive so far as they cannot overlap. Perhaps something goes in <em>both</em> <strong>Projects</strong> and <strong>Journal</strong>—but then that makes it far harder for a user of the site to navigate. And here, as I hinted in my parenthetical above, there is another of these tensions: how I think of something and use it for organization of my materials is broadly orthogonal to the needs or interests of potential readers, and both of us use the site!</p>
<p>Of course, these are problems for all sufficiently complex collections of data. It is equally as hard to manage these questions of organization for large, focused writing projects (like a thesis or a novel) as for a varied collection of materials like this site, though the details differ. It is much <em>harder</em> when dealing with an operating system and its collection of myriad kinds of data. We muddle on with our self-imposed limitations, because the alternative tends to be chaos. Unconstrained tagging systems quickly devolve to madness.</p>
<p>And this is not merely a digital problem: filing cabinets have the same constraints. Yet perhaps the apparent <em>freedom</em> offered by the digital world exacerbates it; the sense that perhaps we could escape the constraint that a note can only go in one place—because it <em>can</em> go in more than one virtual place—makes us reach for solutions which may only increase our frustration in the end. Perhaps just being forced to put something in a place (even if not a perfect one) is a good discipline. But perhaps not; perhaps that freedom is a gift if we use it wisely. I think there is room for further work here in any case.</p>
<p>So: more to come as I continue to chew on these problems of information architecture and user interface. <a href="https://twitter.com/chriskrycho">Links to others’ thoughts</a> and <a href="mailto:hello@chriskrycho.com?subject=Structuring%20content">more detailed comments of your own</a> most welcome.</p>
Chris KrychoSun, 19 Feb 2017 11:00:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-02-19:/2017/where-do-i-file-this.htmlwritingOn Blogginghttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/on-blogging.html<p>My wife is out of town and I had coffee at our church small group tonight, so I’m wide awake and up late, thinking about <em>blogging</em>. It’s been on my mind a lot lately. (And what follows is, appropriately, as you will see, blogging in the old style—which is to say: a bit rambly. I apologize. It’s the coffee.)</p>
<p>A friend at our small group meeting tonight mentioned his intent to start blogging this year. He had a lot of good reasons for jumping in, and I strongly encouraged it. Blogging is not for everyone—we’ll get to that—but blogging is <em>good</em>. This newish thing, writing-on-the-web-in-a-log, has been a part of my life for over a decade now. I wrote my first post on Xanga in the fall of 2005, and I have not gone more than a matter of weeks between posts since. It is not hyperbole to say I cannot imagine <em>not</em> blogging at this point. (The sheer number of words I <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html" title="So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.">published last year</a> should serve to drive home that point: even in a year which was full to the brim, I somehow ended up publishing almost 70,000 words.)</p>
<p>And yet, blogging is not at all like it was in when I started in 2005. Both for good and for ill. The mid-2000s were in many ways the height of blogs’ power and reach. Individual sites still hosted all their own content; blogging networks were nascent; and the ability of small content providers to outdo the old guard was beginning to be felt at all levels. Bloggers made a difference in the 2004 election not <em>so</em> different than the way Twitter shaped all sorts of politics in 2016.</p>
<p>Twitter. That brings us to one of the things that has changed. Microblogging is new. And social media more generally has changed a great deal. Facebook was still the fledgling upstart nipping at MySpace’s heels when I published that first post on Xanga. Today, Facebook dominates the web, and Twitter—not even a product at all in 2005—has taken enormous chunks of the time and attention of the would-be writerly class (journalists especially).</p>
<p>I first took my own blogging <em>seriously</em> on <a href="http://blog.chriskrycho.com">the Blogger site</a> which first ran in parallel with and then displaced that Xanga. And Blogger, too, evokes a different time: when individuals setting up blogs was trendy, and when the competition between WordPress and Blogger could be called a competition. (Much-neglected Blogger trucks on still, but WordPress powers perhaps a quarter of the sites on the web.)</p>
<p>But for all that, some things haven’t changed. Business plans still matter—and Ev Williams, founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, still hasn’t figured out something truly sustainable. Attention-driven advertising of the same sort that powered Blogger then and now, and which powers Twitter and Facebook equally, continues to be a race toward the bottom. Sustainable publishing on the web is a mirage for all but a few, because <a href="https://stratechery.com/2014/publishers-smiling-curve/">content is plentiful and distinguishing features few</a>. The <a href="http://daringfireball.net">Daring Fireball</a>s of the world are notable, these days, not least for how few of them there are.</p>
<p>In some ways, there is something real to mourn in the passing of the web of those early days when I started blogging. People <em>did</em> own their own content (at least, to a far greater degree than now). Blogs linked to each other, using <a href="https://en.support.wordpress.com/comments/pingbacks/">ping-backs</a> to let sites know when they’d been linked. Comment sections flourished.</p>
<p>But that era also required a level of technical knowledge that was simply too high a bar for most people. To be sure, anyone could set up a blog with enough grit, and WordPress and Blogger lowered the bar. But subscribing to another blog meant wrangling RSS and learning the arcana of managing Google Reader (which soon swallowed all competitors before its own too-delayed demise). Twitter’s “follow” button seems a revelation by comparison; it is no wonder at all that first Tumblr and then Medium embraced the idea of blogs-as-social-media, “following” and all. Being able not only to respond, and only if the author so allowed, but also to <em>initiate</em> with anyone else on the service… the first time you @-mentioned someone well-known in your circles, and they responded—that was (and is) a heady thing.</p>
<p>Centralization is often a function of convenience. Facebook and Twitter make it simple for you to “connect with” or “follow” whomever you like. No digging for RSS feeds, wondering if they have a non-standard symbol for it or hoping desperately that it’s at the root of the site + <code>feed.xml</code>, or (if you really know the secrets of the web) that they set it up as a <code>&lt;link&gt;</code> tag with a <code>rel='alternate'</code> tag so it could just be discovered automatically by a smart-enough feed reader…</p>
<p>You see? If you aren’t technical yourself, your eyes just glazed over in that paragraph, and that’s the point. The technical details make sense if you understand them. But understanding them is hard; and more to the point, they don’t matter for what people actually want to accomplish.</p>
<p>This is the fundamental mistake of Manton Reece’s new <a href="http://micro.blog">micro.blog</a> project (which I like in principle, and whose goals <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/micro/">I clearly share</a>). People as a whole don’t even know there might be a reason to prefer the open web, where everyone owned their own content and there was no central clearing-house of information. Facebook offers real value to people: it shows them things they’re interested, and keeps them coming back precisely by tailoring its algorithm to make sure they don’t see too many things they <em>don’t</em> want to see. (The polarization that helps foster may be dreadful, but it’s <a href="https://stratechery.com/2016/fake-news/">very good business</a>.) The same goes for Twitter, regardless of the structure of its timeline: people self-select into their lists of whom to follow. Manton’s project is a good one in many ways—but the problem it solves is a <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/5.03/">Winning Slowly</a> kind of problem, and one that takes a lot of selling when the problem Facebook solves is obvious: <em>I want a new story and a picture of my cousin’s kid and a funny cat video.</em> Decentralizing, whatever its benefits (and again: note well my <em>bona fides</em> <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/chriskrycho.com">here</a>), makes those basic tasks <em>harder</em>. I’ve followed what is now the micro.blog project from a distance for years now—and I’ve always had this one, nagging but oh-so-important question. <em>How does this solve a <strong>user</strong> problem?</em></p>
<p>The answer, if there is one, is a decades-long play. It’s a hedge against technological oligarchy. But how do you get people to care? What’s the pitch? The technical problems are easy compared to that—and the technical problems <em>are not easy</em>; they remain almost untouched in the last decade, and micro.blog has no intent to address some of the core issues. Real-time interaction is what makes Twitter Twitter; ping-backs aren’t even close. And that’s just Twitter; Facebook outstrips it by far.</p>
<p>And Medium? Medium doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up (and it never has; the same as Twitter). As a second pass at Blogger, it has better aesthetics and something like a mission. Ev <a href="https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be">writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans who want to get smarter about the world every day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s a lovely-sounding sentiment. It’s also—for today, at least—contentless business blather. “Building a transformational product for curious humans who want to get smarter about the world every day” sounds great, but it doesn’t mean anything. Medium is a beautiful product without a reason to exist. (How often do you see a founder basically admit: <em>We have no idea what we’re doing here</em>? But that’s roughly what Ev did.) That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. It just means no one has thought of a <em>good</em> reason for it to just yet.</p>
<p>Medium as a centralized, social medium for longer-form writing is better than nothing. I’ll take Medium + Facebook + Google over just Facebook + Google any day. But is there something lost when every blog post looks the same, and when everyone is locked into one more centralized platform? Yes. Just as there is something <em>gained</em> by people having a place to look. The questions are: whether the costs are indeed higher than the benefits; and even if so whether people can be persuaded of those costs when they all take a decade to appear, and Medium is really pleasant to scroll through <em>right now</em>.</p>
<p>By whatever quirk of temperament, I’m old-school about blogs. I’d love for the open web to win out over all the centralizers. That’s not going to happen: <em>centralization provides too much value to users</em>. But we can hope the open web will flourish alongside centralized sources. And, far more importantly, we can work to that end.</p>
<p>We can show people why it matters, and teach them how to own for themselves even the things you publish on Facebook. We can make philosophies like <abbr title="Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere"><a href="https://indieweb.org/POSSE">POSSE</a></abbr> easier to implement (because right now it’s just plain <em>hard</em>). We can let Twitter be secondary and our own blogs primary as a way of setting an example. We can do the hard technical work of figuring out something like real-time, decentralized, better-than-ping-back commenting-and-threading-and-responding for all sorts of content on the web.</p>
<p>But even solving those technical problems will require us to recognize that the bigger and more important problems are <em>human</em> problems. It’s going to require distinguishing, for example, between <a href="https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426">the web we have to save</a> and <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/12-31-0817.html">mere ephemera</a>. If there are goods of how-blogging-was-in-2008 that are worth keeping, what if anything do they have to do with whether the content of nearly any Twitter account is “owned” by the user who generated them? Will the user care, two decades from now? (Or two days?)</p>
<p>Put another way, we need to care about the open web not in some general or abstract sense, and certainly not just on its technical merits, but instead—and quite specifically—as one means of serving other people. If we cannot express it in those terms, we show that we do not understand the real problems at all. It wouldn’t be the first time a bunch of technically-oriented nerds missed the boat.</p>
Chris KrychoWed, 04 Jan 2017 23:25:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-01-04:/2017/on-blogging.htmlwritingopen web2016 in Review, Part 6 of 6http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way!</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html">Part 1: Running headfirst into a wall of pneumonia.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html">Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html">Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html">Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond.</a></li>
<li>Part 6: Plans for 2017! (this post)</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>In 2017, I really only have a few big goals:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>Graduate seminary.</li>
<li>Spend good time with my family.</li>
<li>Love our church well.</li>
<li>Work hard for Olo.</li>
<li>Save money for a house.</li>
<li>Replace <a href="https://github.com/getpelican/pelican">Pelican</a> with <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/lightning-rs">Lightning</a> for this site.</li>
</ol>
<p>I have a bunch of smaller goals, too, of course. That list includes:</p>
<ul>
<li>publish two episodes of New Rustacean every month (of various formats—not all the full-length teaching-a-subject type)</li>
<li>publish 16–20 episodes of Winning Slowly</li>
<li>complete a full-length sprint triathlon<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></li>
<li>run a <a href="http://cityofoaksmarathon.com">marathon</a></li>
<li>be able to do 15 consecutive pull-ups and 100 consecutive push-ups</li>
<li>lose ten pounds and get back down to my target weight</li>
<li>document all the undocumented features in Rust, and get the Rust reference all the way up to date (<a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/38643">tracking issue</a>)</li>
<li>finish a couple side projects (and bring in the associated money!)</li>
<li>teach in our small group at least a half dozen times</li>
<li>write at least one long essay for Mere Orthodoxy</li>
<li>publish the scripts and transcripts of New Rustacean as an ebook</li>
<li>publish hard copies of the archives of my blog, in a way that mirrors the style of the site at the time it was written</li>
<li>fully archive the Blogger and WordPress versions of this blog as static HTML</li>
<li>move all the sites I host (mine and others) out of shared hosting and into a server I manage (probably Digital Ocean or Linode)</li>
</ul>
<p>But basically all of those are flexible (and, if I’m honest, so is #6 in the first list—though it’s a <em>high</em> priority as far as the flexible ones go).</p>
<p>I have a pretty good handle on how I’m going to chase those things. The productivity patterns I’ve established over the last couple years are serving me well so far, and I expect them to continue to. After graduation, things will obviously look a little different, and I’m looking forward to that, too. Being able to take vacations where I’m not losing ground by not working on school projects? That sounds truly amazing.</p>
<p>I’m also looking forward to digging into more books I want to read and making progress on writing I want to do in the realm of theology, philosophy, ethics, and so on. I’ve spent nearly all the mental energy I have available for those subjects on seminary work over the past several years (with varying degrees of value for that effort). Once again being able to focus my own external studies as I like will be very freeing, I think. I hope to find some ways to continue to work at something like an academic level, and—crazy though it sounds right <em>now</em>—I do hope to get a Ph.D. in <em>something</em> in a few decades. But I am looking forward to having a lot of years of reading and writing outside academia between now and then.</p>
<p>All those goals are good, but ultimate I’m willing to just see what the year brings. I’d love to compose music again more regularly and at greater length. I’d love to write more fiction, and more (and better) poetry. But we’ll also be starting some schooling with Ellie, and dealing with the logistics of planning a move to Colorado sometime in late 2017 or the first half of 2018. We’ll be enjoying just not having nearly so much to do right after finishing seminary. It’s worth remembeirng to rest, and not do just jump into another season of being incredibly slammed by busyness. I plan to take some time to read novels and play video games, too. Those things are good for our souls in their own way.</p>
<p>And come what may, I hope to glorify God in the midst of it. Rest, work, play, side projects, you name it—<em>soli deo gloria.</em></p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>750m swim, 20km (12mi) ride, 5km (3.1mi) run<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoSun, 01 Jan 2017 08:00:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2017-01-01:/2017/2016-review-6.htmlwritingpodcastingsoftware developmentfamilyproductivityfitness2016-in-review2016 in Review, Part 5 of 6http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way!</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html">Part 1: Or: a ridiculous year summarized!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html">Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html">Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source.</a></li>
<li>Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond. (this post)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html">Part 6: Plans for 2017!</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>At a number of points over the last few years, I’ve tackled the question of productivity. I always have far more I <em>want</em> to get done than I’m able to actually get to. A few of those posts:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/boosting-my-productivity.html" title="Boosting My Productivity">Boosting My Productivity</a> (December, 2014)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/a-new-schedule.html" title="A New Schedule">A New Schedule: Trying to make better use of my time toward my goals</a> (July 2016)</li>
</ul>
<p>A common theme of all productivity plans, of course, is that one can get more focused on the details of the plan than on actually being productive! I’m happy to say, however, that this <em>wasn’t</em> the case for me with these productivity approaches. First, I have never allowed myself to be slavish about them. If I need to do something different on a given day, I do something different. Second, I am generally able to remember that the point of the plan is <em>what I’m getting done</em>. So with that in mind, some comments particularly on the plan I sketched out <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/a-new-schedule.html" title="A New Schedule">mid-year this year</a>.</p>
<p>I fell off that wagon almost immediately. Readers who’ve stuck with me through these various updates will note that this ambitious plan preceded my disastrous 20-mile run and the ensuing bout of walking pneumonia by a matter of days. It took me until September to get back on the horse, so to speak, because even after I got over being sick, I was traveling—and nothing throws off my schedule like traveling! Happily, I got quite a bit done both during the conference trip I took and during the week I was in Colorado for my youngest sister’s wedding, but it wasn’t until after both of those that I was able to settle back into the routine I’d aimed for.</p>
<p>The major themes of that post were a detailed plan for my days, cutting out a lot of my social media, and thinking about weekends. The detailed plan for my days I kept off and on. I never consistently managed to have the block of time-for-side-projects at the end of my days, and that increasingly meant those things cut into weekends (impacting that goal as well). As for social media, that’s largely been a success: I now rarely get on Facebook, and only check Twitter from time to time. Certainly neither is much of a timesink anymore. I do continue to make heavy use of Slack outside of work, but I’ve found a good balance there (and the main communities I’m a part of have gone through their own adjustments as we’ve <em>all</em> found the need for this kind of focus and balance).</p>
<p>So it wasn’t perfect, but I did find it a very useful approach overall. I fully expect to stick with something very like it in 2017. Hopefully I won’t be pulling as many 10–11 hour days as I was in the latter half of 2016—but regardless, building this new discipline around the overall structure of each day was very helpful.</p>
<p>One <em>big</em> part of my approach to productivity that I’m definitely going to keep is the “pomodoro” technique. I first mentioned this in the <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2014/boosting-my-productivity.html" title="Boosting My Productivity">first</a> discussion I posted about this, but I’ve embraced it more and more. I work in 25-minute blocks, punctuated by 5-minute breaks. Nearly all of those 5-minute breaks entail walking, and as a result I get about 2–3 miles of walking in every day on top of my runs. That helps enormously with focus. This fall, I also embraced the <em>other</em> half of the pomodoro technique: writing down goals and outcomes for each of those 25-minute blocks. Even more than the daily goals I discussed in the opening post of this series, this lower level of tracking has proved very helpful. It has given me a sense of what I have actually accomplished each day, and it has also helped me <em>focus</em> as I’m trying to keep moving on various tasks each day. I highly recommend using the pomodoro approach (adapted as necessary to your particular circumstances, of course) as a tool for that kind of focus and productivity.</p>
<p>I’d be remiss if I didn’t also note the following <em>very</em> substantial factors in my productivity:</p>
<ul>
<li><p><strong>fitness/health:</strong> if I’m active, I focus better. People say they don’t have time to exercise; I mean it when I say I don’t have time <em>not</em> to. I keep it pretty simple: running, cycling, swimming, and body-weight strength stuff. But I do it basically every day. And we eat fairly healthily. Both of those are incredibly important.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>sleep:</strong> no matter how busy I am, I don’t pull all-nighters or anything of the sort. I get a minimum of 6 and usually 7–7½ hours of sleep every night. Even when I’m tired from pulling week after week of 10-hour work days, I can keep going because I get enough sleep.</p></li>
<li><p><strong>no commute:</strong> working remotely is awesome for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that I don’t lose the hour or three every day to the road/subway/etc. that many people I know do. That’s a <em>lot</em> of time over the course of a year. 48 working weeks means if you commute for an hour total every day, that’s 240 hours a year—that’s 30 8-hour days worth of “getting things done”.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Perhaps at some point after I finish seminary I will expand the various things I do in productivity into a more complete series, but this gives you a good idea of what 2016 looked like, and what I expect 2017 to look like!</p>
Chris KrychoSat, 31 Dec 2016 09:30:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-12-31:/2016/2016-review-5.htmlwritingpodcastingsoftware developmentfamilyproductivityfitness2016-in-reviewpomodoro2016 in Review, Part 4 of 6http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way!</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html">Part 1: Running headfirst into a wall of pneumonia.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html">Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more!</a></li>
<li>Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source. (this post)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html">Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html">Part 6: Plans for 2017!</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>This year at Olo was a great year overall. I very much enjoy working with the people there, the tech stack is good and they’re paying me to do what I love, and if the product isn’t lighting my world on fire (online restaurant ordering is cool, but restaurants aren’t a passion of mine), that’s a tradeoff I can live with. Working with good people with a good tech stack on a product you find <em>fine</em> rather than <em>amazing</em> is actually pretty great. I’m grateful for previous jobs, but this one has superceded them in every possible way. I’m <em>glad</em> to start work every day—and in truth, there have been more than a few days where I would have liked nothing more than to keep writing JavaScript rather than switching over to do some reading and writing for seminary. That bodes well for my future plans: post-seminary, I expect to bump from 30 to 40 hours a week with Olo<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> and keep making our software as awesome as I can. And I expect to enjoy that!</p>
<p>Speaking of numbers: GitHub reports that I contributed +29,463/−13,726 lines of code in our new mobile web ordering experience, which I helped build nearly from scratch this year. (That “negative” is stuff I rewrote or removed entirely by finding a better implementation.)</p>
<p>Quite a bit of my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">writing</a> this year was technical, too: some ~33,000 of the words on my blog—fully a third of the things I published on this site apart from microblog posts and schoolwork—was about software. That included entries 11–18 of my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/rust-and-swift.html">Rust and Swift</a> series, but about 20,000 words were assorted discussions of JavaScript, Rust, podcasting, functional programming, etc. A fair bit of that content came out of things I worked on for Olo, either directly (as in the case of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/what-is-functional-programming.html" title="What is Functional Programming? (And why should we care about it?)">this talk</a>) or indirectly (as in the case of <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/keyof-and-mapped-types-in-typescript-21.html" title="keyof and Mapped Types in TypeScript 2.1">this discussion of TypeScript 2.1</a>) That’s a good mix, and I hope to continue putting out material that’s useful to others as well as interesting to me. (I do get tweets now and again confirming that the content is helpful, and I <em>don’t</em> run analytics on the site at all—so if you like something I write, please tell me. It’s encouraging. And that goes for <em>any</em> author you read, as a rule.)</p>
<p>Finally, I actually did a little bit of open-source contributing this year. Not as much as I’d like, but a little. And I also count New Rustacean as a pretty substantial contribution to the Rust community. The fact that it isn’t code doesn’t diminish what it’s doing. If you’re feeling like code is the only thing that <em>really</em> counts, recognize that all the code in the world isn’t that useful without explanations of how to use it, helping people become interested in the first place, and so on. Speaking of non-code contributions, the open-source contribution I’m <em>most</em> proud of is certainly the <a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1636">Rust RFC</a> I wrote and which was recently accepted and merged. It proposed (and it is now the official policy of the Rust project) that no new features may be added to the (stable version of the) language or the standard library without first being documented. This is a big deal for the language, and it was also a big deal for me, in that it was another place where—despite being far too busy to write a lot of Rust code this year—I could make a real difference in a community I’m passionate about. And one of my goals for next year is a direct follow-on from that: <a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/38643">actually implementing the requirement</a>!</p>
<p>The other big thing going on for me in the software world is that I started work on <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/lightning-rs">Lightning</a>, a new static site generator in Rust. (There’s another such project, <a href="http://cobalt-org.github.io">Cobalt</a>, which is already usable.) I’ve been pushing up against the limits of <a href="http://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/">Pelican</a>, my current generator, for a while. And I’ve looked around time and again, and never found a CMS or SSG that does everything my peculiar publishing needs require (<em>especially</em> in a way that I like!). And my needs are indeed peculiar, though probably not wholly unique; for most people, any one of <a href="https://staticsitegenerators.net"><em>many</em> other site generators</a> would work just fine. So I’m doing what I’ve been thinking about doing for years, and building my own. My immediate goals are mostly just to have something that is super speedy and which checks off all my needs from a CMS/site generator. My longer-term goals include getting some good foundational knowledge I’ll need for <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/ulysses-byword-and-just-right.html">my <em>next</em> project</a>. I’m a thousand lines in, and have some pieces working. I hope very much to move off of Pelican and onto Lightning (and get a freshened theme for this site) in 2017!</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Yes, Olo has been incredibly generous and hired me as a full-time employee at 30-hours-a-week with pro-rated salary. Like I said: amazing company.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoFri, 30 Dec 2016 07:00:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-12-30:/2016/2016-review-4.htmlwritingpodcastingsoftware developmentfamilyproductivityfitness2016-in-review2016 in Review, Part 3 of 6http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way!</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html">Part 1: Running headfirst into a wall of pneumonia.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.</a></li>
<li>Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more! (this post)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html">Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html">Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html">Part 6: Plans for 2017!</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>Beyond <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">the written word</a>, the other “writing”-type work I had this year—some of it including <em>actual</em> writing in the form of detailed scripts—was podcasting!</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th style="text-align: center;">Show</th>
<th style="text-align: center;">Episodes</th>
<th style="text-align: center;">Total time</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;">25</td>
<td style="text-align: center;">11h 40m</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.newrustacean.com">New Rustacean</a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;">22</td>
<td style="text-align: center;">6h 46m</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://runwith.chriskrycho.com">Run With Me</a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;">19</td>
<td style="text-align: center;">1h 1m</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.sap-py.com">sap.py</a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;">1</td>
<td style="text-align: center;">12m</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;"><strong>Total</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: center;"><strong>67</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: center;"><strong>19h 39m</strong></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Again, several of those numbers surprised me a bit. For one thing, I had to put New Rustacean on hiatus starting in October courtesy of the crunch I ended up with from the <em>Rust vs. Swift</em> project colliding with the other summer-and-fall commitments I had. For another Stephen and I paused Winning Slowly between Seasons 4 and 5 (as we usually do) and also have taken a mid-season pause on Season 5 because of end-of-semester crunches for both of us and then his wife having a baby a few weeks earlier than expected. Yet in spite of that, almost 20 hours of audio content this year! If I hit that again in 2017, I’ll be happy.</p>
<p>Whether <a href="http://www.sap-py.com">sap.py</a> will be back, I have no idea. I love making the show with Jaimie, but it’s really up to her whether she wants to keep working on Python. Of late, she’s been working on <a href="https://www.etsy.com/shop/PemberlyPrintables" title="Jaimie&#39;s printable shop on Etsy">printable art</a> instead, and that’s delightful in its own right. I’ve <a href="http://runwith.chriskrycho.com/runs/14/">just</a> gotten <a href="http://runwith.chriskrycho.com">Run With Me</a> going again in the past day; I got off track when my headphone microphone stopped working for a bit and never got back <em>on</em> track when it started working again. I’m looking forward to once again talking about running while running.</p>
<p>I expect to be publishing an even wider variety of kinds of episodes of New Rustacean in 2017. Listeners should get another couple of interviews, a lot more of the “here is a Rust concept in detail” episodes (at least one a month in general, I hope!), news episodes, undoubtedly a few bonus episodes, and a new “Crates You Should Know” format designed to highlight crates I’ve found useful in my own Rust work. I continue to find Rust a wonderful language, and I hear regularly that this is one of people’s favorite programming podcasts. I hope to keep it that way!</p>
<p>We expect to wrap up <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/season-5.html" title="Winning Slowly Season 5: Structure and Agency">Season 5</a> of <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a> mid-spring, and then begin recording Season 6 mid-to-late summer. All of that is pending how things go as Stephen finishes his dissertation and likely prepares to move across the country to take a job as a professor somewhere, of course. But that’s the plan—and yes, we already know the rough shape of Season 6, even this far out. We know the season topic, and have some basic ideas of where we want to go with it. As is usually the case with our “seasons” now, it will take ideas we’ve touched on here and there and turn them into a full-blown, months-long exploration of those ideas as applied to specific issues. Winning Slowly remains one of my very favorite projects, not least because there is (to our knowledge) nothing else out there doing quite the same thing. Tackling long-term trends in technology with a distinctively (though not always overtly) Christian perspective (but <em>not</em> a reductionist one) is apparently our gap to fill. We’ll take it.</p>
<p>Two other podcasting-related bits. First, I wrote a <a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/theses-on-podcasting/" title="32 Theses (and several more words) on Podcasting">~5,000-word piece for Mere Orthodoxy</a> explaining how the medium works, what its constraints are, and what is involved in doing it well. If podcasting is interesting to you, I think the piece is well worth your time—precisely because of, and not in spite of, its length! Second, I gave a pair of guest lectures for Stephen at N.C. State University this fall, which are both available in the <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org/season-bonus.html">bonus section</a> on <a href="http://www.winningslowly.org">Winning Slowly</a>. Those cover some of the same ground as the piece at Mere O, but they also talk a lot more about the details of finding a topic, an “authorial voice”, and an angle for your show.</p>
Chris KrychoThu, 29 Dec 2016 10:30:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-12-29:/2016/2016-review-3.htmlwritingpodcastingsoftware developmentfamilyproductivityfitness2016-in-review2016 in Review, Part 2 of 6http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way!</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html">Part 1: Running headfirst into a wall of pneumonia.</a></li>
<li>Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words. (this post)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html">Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html">Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html">Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html">Part 6: Plans for 2017!</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>One of my goals for 2016 was to continue writing not only on this blog but in other outlets. I did a <em>lot</em> of writing this year, but relatively little of it is published. But here’s a look at some of the numbers! Note that “This site” excludes republication of school papers, and that I don’t have an exact count for the school papers because I’ve already discarded a few of the shorter pieces, but their average length is well-known to me. More on the unpublished <em>Rust vs. Swift</em> project below.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr class="header">
<th style="text-align: center;">Category</th>
<th style="text-align: center;">Words</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/m-div/">School</a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;">~130,500</td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://mereorthodoxy.com/author/chris-krycho/">Mere Orthodoxy</a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;">~6000</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;">This site</td>
<td style="text-align: center;">~63,000<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></td>
</tr>
<tr class="even">
<td style="text-align: center;"><em>Rust vs. Swift</em> project</td>
<td style="text-align: center;">~9350</td>
</tr>
<tr class="odd">
<td style="text-align: center;"><strong>Total</strong></td>
<td style="text-align: center;"><strong>~207,850</strong></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Of the writing for school, only a small fraction of it is <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/m-div/">published here</a>, unlike previous years. Roughly 75,000 words of that content is research notes I put together for an independent study I did—which was deeply profitable for me in terms of thinking through hermeneutical and theological systems, and which will hopefully be helpful for the professor for whom I prepared them, but which are not at all publishable. Another 10,000 of those words fit in a category charitably describable as “busy-work” and publishing them is <em>possible</em> but would have no <em>value</em>. The school-writing also includes the notes and manuscripts for my sermon-delivery class. You can find those sermons <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/sermons/">on this site</a> as well well, with audio, video, and the manuscripts available—but the notes are not worth publishing, as they’re entirely internal. Still: they’re words, I wrote them, and there are a lot of them.</p>
<p>On the plus side, I wrote one of the papers I’m proudest of from my entire seminary career in the spring: <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/realism-and-antirealism.html">Realism and Antirealism—A key debate in the philosophy of science (with interesting implications for young-earth creationism)</a>. I’m happy with it not least because I wrote it in a very compressed fashion because of some family health issues that hit at the end of that semester, and it still turned out extremely well because I had <em>planned</em> it meticulously. Despite having only a single draft with one typo-level revision pass, it’s easily the best paper I’ve ever written. It turns out that doing a really careful outline helps when you’re working at this scale. I’ve not normally been a fan of outlining (and I’ve not normally found it helpful when I’ve tried it), but for any longer, more sustained argument, it’s absolutely necessary.</p>
<p>Of the content on this site (excluding republication of school papers), an astounding ~14,000 of those words are in my “microblog” content. It’s amazing how much those little posts add up. That said, I’m surprised to see that I’ve put out as many <em>other</em> words as I have this year on this site, and the total there is rather staggering. Writing on this site includes everything from <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/ask.html" title="Ask: a short story">fiction</a> and <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/to-paint-god-as-a-man.html" title="To paint God as a man: an Advent poem">poetry</a> to <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/a-simple-childrens-catechism.html">a simple children’s catechism</a> to <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/what-is-functional-programming.html">an introduction to functional programming</a>. I’m exceptionally pleased in retrospect to see how this came out, and I look forward to writing on equally varied terms in the year ahead.</p>
<p>Some 13,000 of the words I wrote for this site were in my <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/rust-and-swift.html">Rust and Swift</a> series, a project I’ve enjoyed enormously since starting it in 2015 and would like to get back to in 2017. It went on hold because I was offered, and accepted, a contract to write a 30–40 page report for O’Reilly comparing the two languages, which was intended to come out this fall. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way some wires got crossed and my pitch and what they wanted didn’t end up being the same. Once that became clear (at the beginning of October), they opted to drop the project. This was a huge disappointment to me: it was a small hit financially, but a big one time-wise, as I sunk a <em>lot</em> of hours into it in what was an already-very-busy fall; the project was over ¾ done when it was dropped.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
<p>A few big lessons I learned from this:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li><p>Don’t overcommit. Even if the project had gone through without issue, it would have been more on my plate than I could reasonably handle. The fact that it was canceled after having done a lot of the work meant it was also <em>financially</em> frustrating, but I had overcommitted regardless. Won’t do that again.</p></li>
<li><p>Be <em>even more</em> clear up-front about the terms and goals of a project. I don’t know how we ended up with the crossed wires we did, but it was extremely frustrating.</p></li>
<li><p>If you can get an advance, get an advance. Just saying.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>In general, I’m quite pleased with the <em>volume</em> of my output in 2016 (who wouldn’t be, right?). I’d definitely like a lot more of that to be public-facing in 2017, even if it’s lower in overall volume. I hope to take the material from that canceled <em>Rust vs. Swift</em> project, expand it slightly, and self-publish it. I also hope to put together at least one substantive essay for Mere Orthodoxy next year. And of course there will probably be thousands of words in this space, too—inevitably more than I even realize.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Note as well that this excludes all the <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/newrustacean.com/tree/589cd13225cde91f92bfca93f6679f2395d78886/docs">podcast scripts</a> I wrote this year! Those would add well over 10,000 more words to this count.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>Yes, that number includes these posts!<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>They wanted an analysis of when you’d choose each language; I pitched a comparison along similar lines to my blog series, looking at the language design choices as a view into software engineering tradeoffs. When the mismatch became clear, I pointed out that “when to choose Rust vs. Swift” is, generally speaking, a roughly two-sentence answer: “Choose Rust for cross-platform, high-performance/low-level code. Choose Swift if you’re writing apps on an Apple platform.” This was not, apparently, obvious to everyone else involved. In the words of the internet: <span style="whitespace: nowrap">¯\_(ツ)_/¯</span><a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoWed, 28 Dec 2016 07:00:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-12-28:/2016/2016-review-2.htmlwritingpodcastingsoftware developmentfamilyproductivityfitness2016-in-review2016 in Review, Part 1 of 6http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way!</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html">Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized</a></li>
<li>Part 1: Running headfirst into a wall of pneumonia. (this post)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html">Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html">Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html">Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html">Part 6: Plans for 2017!</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p><em>Wait, hold on,</em> you say. <em>Go back. How did you get walking pneumonia?</em> This is a fun story, and it’s a huge part of what made the other parts of the latter half of 2016 go the way they did.</p>
<p>I went for what I expected to be a 15–16 mile long run as part of training for the half-marathon I signed up for this year. The previous week <a href="http://runwith.chriskrycho.com/runs/12/" title="Run summary on runwith.chriskrycho.com">I’d done a 14-mile run</a>, so 15–16 would have been no problem. I was feeling <em>awesome</em> on the run, so decided to extend it to 17. This was right at the edge of what makes good sense for a week-over-week increase in mileage; you generally want to stick with ~10% increases and max out at 20%; but 17 is right at that limit relative to 14. So I turned right to cut through another nearby town instead of left to head directly home when I was at roughly the 11-mile mark.</p>
<p>Then, where I <em>did</em> cut back toward home, I took a wrong turn out of a five-way intersection. (You can see on the north end of the map, in Youngsville, <a href="https://www.strava.com/activities/644619792" title="Run overview on Strava">here</a>). I realized this half a mile on, but figured there would be a spot to cut over. There is not. So I got back to where I had taken the wrong turn, filled up my water bottle and hit the bathroom, and made my way home. But at this point, I was already at ~15 miles, and ~4 miles from home. As I got back into our town, I decided: why not just go ahead and extend out to 20 miles?</p>
<p>And the truth is, that extra three quarters of a mile probably didn’t matter a bit. 19.25 vs. 20 miles? Same difference in its effect on my immune system, which is to say: it completely crashed it. A 42% week over week increase in mileage is no joke. The little cold I picked up from my 2-year-old daughter turned into borderline bronchitis. Yay.</p>
<p>What with a busy spring preceding—I had no idea how much busier I would be taking 2 classes and working 30 hours a week than I had been taking 3 classes and working 20 hours a week—I didn’t manage a triathlon. I had contented myself with the thought that I’d likely set another PR in my half marathon, but after weeks of recovery from walking pneumonia, that thought fell apart as well. I lost about a minute per mile in my pace, and my mileage was shot as well. I never got it back—not least because of a writing project which went south on me. I ended up being sick off and on all fall, and I’m only now getting my feet back under me. Sad to say, one of those times I got sick was the week of the half marathon I signed up for, and I’d been getting loud, clear signals from my body on previous runs that I was pushing too hard. So no race <em>at all</em> this year. But better that than pushing and injuring myself.</p>
<p>The year also saw a so-far unreversed weight gain that I find incredibly frustrating. In the first six months of 2016, I gained about ten pounds—despite keeping up the same basic activity level. I attribute this to a combination of factors: metabolic shifts in my late 20s, shifting back to doing almost purely running rather than a mix of running, swimming, and cycling, and the impact of acclimation to a workout load. I’m far from overweight, but I’m also slower and generally a bit flabbier as a result.</p>
<p>Here’s hoping 2017 is <em>much</em> better in all these regards! I plan to do a sprint-length triathlon and a full marathon. And I hope to lose those ten pounds again and get back to that healthier overall weight. That combo seems like the thing to do the year I turn thirty and graduate seminary.</p>
Chris KrychoTue, 27 Dec 2016 17:00:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-12-27:/2016/2016-review-1.htmlwritingpodcastingsoftware developmentfamilyproductivityfitness2016-in-review2016 in Review, Introductionhttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-intro.html<p><i class='editorial'>I originally drafted a single, mammoth post reflecting on this whole year—but at more than 6,000 words, that seemed like a bit much. As such, I’ve broken it into a series of posts, to be published daily through the start of the new year. Hopefully they’re a bit more digestible that way! This first day, you’re getting two posts; the rest of the year, one (at least: in this series!).</i></p>
<ul>
<li>Introduction, or: a ridiculous year summarized (this post)</li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-1.html">Part 1: Running headfirst into a wall of pneumonia.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-2.html">Part 2: So. many. words. I had no idea how many words.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-3.html">Part 3: Podcasting: Winning Slowly, New Rustacean, and more!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-4.html">Part 4: Writing software for Olo and for open source.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/2016-review-5.html">Part 5: Getting things done in 2016 and beyond.</a></li>
<li><a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2017/2016-review-6.html">Part 6: Plans for 2017!</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>2016 was a long, difficult, strange, sometimes wonderful and sometimes dreadful year for me. It was one of the most professionally and scholastically enjoyable and rewarding years of my life, and also one of the most exhausting. As I often do at years-end, I am taking stock publicly of what went well, what went poorly, and what I might do different in a variety of categories—here, mostly in terms of my public-facing endeavors. This year’s summing-up post will also (for, I think, the first time) include some numbers! But first, a few comments on the big picture.</p>
<p>At the end of 2015, I <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2015/thoughts-on-2015-and-2016.html">offered a similar set of reflections</a>. At the end of it, I laid out some plans for 2016:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am going to set a single goal in each of five major categories in my life:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>spiritual:</strong> everything in my walk with God, including my own personal devotions, my involvement in the life of the church, and my “ministry” actions in general</li>
<li><strong>family:</strong> both quantity and quality time spent with my wife and my quickly-growing-up little girls</li>
<li><strong>personal:</strong> podcasting, blogging, and writing for <a href="http://mereorthodoxy.com/author/chris-krycho/">other outlets</a></li>
<li><strong>professional:</strong> working in my new job and as a consultant, and carrying on toward the conclusion of my M. Div.</li>
<li><strong>health/fitness:</strong> continuing to stay healthy, including eating well and continuing to stay fit by running and doing triathlon work</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>Early in the year, I made the habit of writing these out formally on a day-by-day basis—and I did this off and on. If you were to look at my little (Moleskine-branded and delightful-to-me) daily planner, you’d see streaks of weeks where I noted specific tasks and whether I hit them or not, punctuated by weeks and months where I did nothing of the sort. I have always found it difficult to stick with these kinds of things, in part because I usually have a pretty good idea what I need to do on any given day without writing it down somewhere. (I use <a href="https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/" title="OmniFocus">other tools</a> for tracking mid- and long-term deadlines for school.) In July, I started mashing this idea up with <a href="http://bulletjournal.com" title="Bullet Journal site">bullet journaling</a>, and I found that I (a) really like the system and (b) also didn’t stick with it consistently. A lot of that came down to the fact that I got thrown off—horribly—by getting a mild-but-still-utterly-debilitating case of walking pneumonia in July. (On which, more in a moment.)</p>
<p>So much for last year’s ideas about <em>how</em> I was going to hit those goals. How did I actually do at addressing them? The answer is: <em>okay</em>. 2016 was not an amazing year. It was not a terrible year. But it had as many downs as ups.</p>
<p>My own walk with God remains <em>steady</em>. Nothing amazing to report here, but I’m more than okay with that. I will perhaps say more on this in another post, but the older I get the more convinced I am that emotional highs are a trap. Sentiment and true religion are <em>not</em> the same thing; and Scripture calls us to <em>faithfulness</em>, not <em>spiritual feelings</em>. As such, in a year with this many bumps, I am glad to say that I had no horrible falls, and I read my Bible nearly every day and prayed every single day.</p>
<p>Our family learned some Bible verses, and started working on the Heidelberg Catechism. We shared the gospel with people as we were able, and met faithfully with our church. We were not extraordinary, and we were far from flawless, but I think we did <em>well</em>. I hope and pray in God’s grace we are able to continue in faithfully doing well in the years to come. Certainly if there is one thing I hope to do more of in 2017 it is spend time with my girls. I am not a huge “kid person,” but these years are precious and go by quickly; far better to spend more time with them and have a podcast episode or a writing project go out later (or not at all) than to miss these little years.</p>
Chris KrychoTue, 27 Dec 2016 16:00:00 -0500tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-12-27:/2016/2016-review-intro.htmlwritingpodcastingsoftware developmentfamilyproductivityfitness2016-in-reviewUlysses, Byword, and “Just Right”http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2016/ulysses-byword-and-just-right.html<p>I’m trying out Ulysses again, as it’s been updated substantially since I last used it. I think the main thing to say about it is that it’s gorgeous and a really great editor, and that there is nonetheless something about it which makes it feel not quite as <em>fluid</em> as Byword always has.</p>
<p>Neither of them quite <em>nails</em> it for my purposes, though:</p>
<ul>
<li>Neither is quite there for text that includes a lot of code samples. (Basically: neither supports the GitHub variations on Markdown, which are incredibly important for <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/rust-and-swift.html">a lot of my writing</a></li>
<li>Neither has the ability to do things like autocompletion of citations from something like BibLatex. (No standalone app does, to my knowledge.)</li>
<li>Ulysses’ most powerful features only work in its iCloud bucket. And they’re not standard: rather than embracing <a href="http://criticmarkup.com">CriticMarkup</a> for comments, they have their own. The same is true of e.g. their code blocks.</li>
<li>Ulysses <em>converts</em> any other Markdown documents to its own custom variant when you open them. Had those documents formatted a way you liked (e.g. with specific kinds of link or footnote formatting)? Don’t expect them to still be that way.</li>
<li>Byword really does one thing well: opening and writing single documents. It does this extremely well, but it also has none of the library management that is useful for larger projects.</li>
</ul>
<p>Both of these apps are really wonderful in many ways, and I think it’s fair to say that they’re <em>perfect</em> for many writers. <a href="http://jaimiekrycho.com/">My wife</a>, for example, does nearly all her fiction writing in Ulysses; it works wonderfully for her. But for the kinds of writing I do—usually technical in one way or another—it is limited in its utility. That’s not really a critique of the apps. It’s more the recognition that I have some pretty unusual requirements of my writing apps.</p>
<p>That said, I don’t think I’m the only person out there who has these particular needs. I am, for example, hardly the only person working with citations and academic text, or writing Markup with lots of code samples in it. And as much as you can bend general-purpose text editors like <a href="https://atom.io">Atom</a> to your will,<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a> it’s not the same as a dedicated writing app that focuses—in the ways that Ulysses and Byword both do—on just being a great tool for <em>writing</em>. Writing and writing <em>code</em> are not the same, after all. A tool that’s really well-optimized for the latter isn’t necessarily well-optimized for the former.</p>
<p>Keep your ears open. You might just be hearing more about this in the future.</p>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Trust me, I have: I have Zen mode installed, a custom Byword-like theme I use when I just want to write, and even a citation autocompletion package integrated with it. It’s not bad. But I still don’t love it as a first-choice <em>writing</em> tool.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoSat, 26 Mar 2016 08:00:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2016-03-26:/2016/ulysses-byword-and-just-right.htmldesignsoftware developmentwritingAcademic Markdown and Citationshttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2015/academic-markdown-and-citations.html<p>Much of my past few weeks were taken up with study for and writing and editing <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2015/not-exactly-a-millennium.html">a paper</a> for one of my classes at Southeastern. I’ve been writing all of my papers in Markdown ever since I got here, and haven’t regretted any part of that… except that managing references and footnotes has been painful at times.</p>
<p>Footnotes in Markdown look like this:</p>
<pre class="markdown"><code>Here is some text.[^fn]
[^fn]: And the footnote!</code></pre>
<p>This poses no problems at all for normal footnotes. Academic writing introduces a few wrinkles, though, which means that this has always been the main pain point of my use of Markdown for writing papers.</p>
<p>Many academic citation styles (including the Chicago Manual of Style, on which our seminary’s <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/turabian/turabian_citationguide.html">style guide</a> is based) tend to have a long version of the footnote appear first, followed by short versions later. Nearly <em>all</em> academic citations styles make free use of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibid.">“ibid.”</a> abbreviation for repeated references to save space, time, and energy. Here is how that might look in manually-written footnotes, citing the very paper in which I sorted this all out:</p>
<pre class="markdown"><code>Some text in which I cite an author.[^fn1]
More text. Another citation.[^fn2]
What is this? Yet _another_ citation?[^fn3]
[^fn1]: So Chris Krycho, &quot;Not Exactly a Millennium,&quot; chriskrycho.com, July 22,
2015, http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2015/not-exactly-a-millennium.html
(accessed July 25, 2015), ¶6.
[^fn2]: Contra Krycho, ¶15, who has everything _quite_ wrong.
[^fn3]: ibid.</code></pre>
<p>This seems straightforward enough, though it is a bit of work to get the format right for each different kind of citation (articles, books, ebooks, electronic references to articles…). Things <em>really</em> get complicated in the editing process, though. For example, what if I needed to flip the order of some of these notes because it became clear that the paragraphs needed to move around? This happens <em>frequently</em> during the editorial process. It becomes particularly painful when dealing with the “ibid.”-type references, because if I insert a new reference between two existing references, I have to go back in and manually add all that the reference content again myself.<a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></p>
<p>Enter Pandoc and <span class="tex">BibT<span class="texE">E</span>X</span>.</p>
<section id="managing-citations" class="level2">
<h2>Managing Citations</h2>
<p>The idea of plain-text solutions to academic writing is not especially new; only the application of Markdown to it is—and that, only relatively. People have been doing this, and <a href="http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2014/01/23/plain-text/">documenting their approaches</a>, for quite a while. Moreover, tools for managing references and citations have existed for quite some time as well; the entire <a href="http://www.latex-project.org">L<span class="texA">A</span>T<span class="texE">E</span>X</a> toolchain is largely driven by the concerns of academic publishing, and as such there are tools in the <span class="tex">L<span class="texA">A</span>T<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> ecosystem which address many of these problems.<a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
<p>One such is <span class="tex">BibT<span class="texE">E</span>X</span>, and the later (more capable) <span class="tex">BibL<span class="texA">A</span>T<span class="texE">E</span>X</span>: tools for managing bibliographies in <span class="tex">L<span class="texA">A</span>T<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> documents. The <span class="tex">BibT<span class="texE">E</span>X</span>/<span class="tex">BibL<span class="texA">A</span>T<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> approach to managing citations in a document is the use of the <code>\cite</code> command, with the use of “keys” which map to specific documents: <code>\cite{krycho:2015aa}</code>, for example.</p>
<p>This is not Markdown, of course. But other folks who have an interest in Markdown and academic writing have put their minds to the problem already. Folks such as Jon MacFarlane, the originator and lead developer of <a href="http://pandoc.org">Pandoc</a>, perhaps the single most capable text-conversion tool in existence. As it turns out, Pandoc Markdown supports a <a href="http://pandoc.org/README.html#citations">citation extension</a> to the basic markup. It’s just a variant on the <span class="tex">BibT<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> citation style that feels more at home in Markdown: a pair of braces and an <code>@</code>, plus the citation key, like <code>[@krycho]</code>. Moreover, Pandoc knows how to use <span class="tex">BibT<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> libraries, as well as many others, and <a href="http://citationstyles.org">Citation Style Languages</a> (<abbr>CSL</abbr>s) to generate markup in <em>exactly</em> the format needed for any given citation style.<a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a></p>
<p>Instead of writing out all those citations details by hand, then, I can just format my footnotes like this (assuming the citekey I had set up for the article was <code>krycho:revelation:2015</code>):</p>
<pre class="markdown"><code>Some text in which I cite an author.[^fn1]
More text. Another citation.[^fn2]
What is this? Yet _another_ citation?[^fn3]
[^fn1]: [@krycho:revelation:2015], ¶6.
[^fn2]: Contra [@krycho:revelation:2015], ¶15, who has everything _quite_ wrong.
[^fn3]: [@krycho:revelation:2015].</code></pre>
<p>This is much simpler and, importantly, has the exact same form for each citation. Pandoc will take care of making sure that the first reference is in the long form, later references are in the short form, and repeated references are in the “ibid.” form as appropriate. It even renders a properly sorted and structured Works Cited section.<a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a></p>
<p>The slightly complex command I used to generate a Word document from a Markdown file with citations (using my own <span class="tex">BibT<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> library and the Chicago Manual of Style <abbr>CSL</abbr>) on the command line is:<a href="#fn5" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref5" role="doc-noteref"><sup>5</sup></a></p>
<pre class="bash"><code>$ pandoc revelation.md --smart --standalone \
--bibliography /Users/chris/Documents/writing/library.bib \
--csl=/Users/chris/Documents/writing/chicago.csl -o revelation.docx</code></pre>
<p>To see an extended sample of this kind of usage in practice, take a look at the <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2015/not-exactly-a-millennium.txt">Markdown source</a> for the paper I wrote last week, using exactly this approach. Every footnote that references a specific source simply has a cite key of this variety. The header metadata includes a path to the bibliography file and a <abbr>CSL</abbr>. (These could be configured globally, as well, but I chose to specify them on a per-file basis so that if I want or need to use <em>different</em> styles or a separate library for another file at a later time, I can do so with a minimum of fuss. More on this below.)</p>
<p><a href="/downloads/revelation.docx">Here</a> is the rendered result. You can see that it automatically generated everything right down to the “ibid.”-style footnotes. I made a few, fairly minimal tweaks (replacing the search <abbr>URL</abbr> with an <abbr>ATLA</abbr> database catalog reference and inserting a section break before the Works Cited list), and turned the paper in—confident, for the first time since I started seminary, that all of the references were in the right order and the right format. With carefully formatted reference documents (with their own style sets),<a href="#fn6" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref6" role="doc-noteref"><sup>6</sup></a> I was able to generate an actually <em>nice</em> <abbr><a href="/downloads/revelation-pretty.pdf">PDF</a></abbr> version of the paper from another Word document, as well.<a href="#fn7" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref7" role="doc-noteref"><sup>7</sup></a></p>
<p>And, better yet, you don’t even have to put citations in footnotes. As <a href="https://twitter.com/anjdunning">@anjdunning</a> pointed out in a <a href="https://twitter.com/anjdunning/status/625415216575197184">tweet</a> response to the original version of this post:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.twitter.com/chriskrycho">@chriskrycho</a> Don’t put citekeys in a footnote: write everything as inline citations and it will also generate notes when asked by CSL def. <a href="https://twitter.com/anjdunning/status/625415216575197184">∞</a> July 26, 2015 17:19</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In my standard example from above, then, you could simply do this:</p>
<pre class="markdown"><code>Some text in which I cite an author.[@krycho:revelation:2015, ¶6]
More text. Another citation.[Contra @krycho:revelation:2015, ¶15, who has
everything *quite* wrong.]
What is this? Yet _another_ citation?[@krycho:revelation:2015]</code></pre>
<p>This will generate the same markup for my purposes here; and as <a href="https://twitter.com/anjdunning">@anjdunning</a> noted, it goes one step further and does what’s appropriate for the <abbr>CSL</abbr>. This might be handy if, for example, you wanted to use the Chicago notes-bibliography style in one format, but switch to a simpler parenthetical citation style for a different medium—or even if you had a paper to submit to different journals with different standards. Having the citations inline thus has many advantages.</p>
<p>Now, there are still times when you might want to split those out into distinct footnotes, of course. That second one is a good candidate, at least for the way I tend to structure my plain-text source. I find it useful in the case of <em>actual</em> footnote content—i.e. text that I’m intentionally leaving aside from the main text, even with reference to other authors—to split it out from the main flow of the paragraph, so that someone reading the plain text source gets a similar effect to someone reading the web or Word or <abbr>PDF</abbr> versions, with the text removed from the flow of thought. In any case, it’s quite nice that Pandoc has the power and flexibility such that you don’t <em>have</em> to.</p>
<p>Finally, you don’t actually <em>need</em> the brackets around the citekey, depending on how you’re using the reference. If you wanted to cite the relevant author inline, you can—and it will properly display both the inline name and a reference (footnote, parenthetical, etc.) in line with the <abbr>CSL</abbr> you’ve chosen. If I were going to quote myself in a paper, I would do something like this:</p>
<pre class="markdown"><code>As @krycho:revelation:2015 comments:
&gt; This was a hard paper to write.</code></pre>
<p>This is <em>extremely</em> powerful, and while I didn’t take advantage of it in my first paper using these tools, you can bet I will be in every future paper I write.</p>
<section id="all-those-references" class="level3">
<h3>All those references</h3>
<p>Of course, as is probably apparent, managing a <span class="tex">BibT<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> library by hand is no joke. Entries tend to look like this:</p>
<pre class="tex"><code>@book{beale:revelation:2015,
Date-Added = {2015-07-20 21:16:02 +0000},
Date-Modified = {2015-07-20 21:21:05 +0000},
Editor = {G. K. Beale and David H. Campbell},
Publisher = {William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company},
Title = {Revelation: A Shorter Commentary},
Year = {2015}}</code></pre>
<p>While there is a lot of utility in having that data available in text, on disk, no one wants to <em>edit</em> that by hand.<a href="#fn8" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref8" role="doc-noteref"><sup>8</sup></a> Gladly, editing it by hand is not necessary. For this project, I used the freely available <a href="http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net">BibDesk</a> tool, which is a workable (albeit not very pretty and not <em>very</em> capable) manager for <span class="tex">BibT<span class="texE">E</span>X</span>:</p>
<figure>
<img src="//cdn.chriskrycho.com/images/bibdesk.png" title="Not very pretty, but it does work" alt="BibDesk – open to the library for my Revelation paper" /><figcaption>BibDesk – open to the library for my Revelation paper</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Once I filled in the details for each item and set a citekey for it, I was ready to go: BibDesk just stores the files in a standard <code>.bib</code> file on the disk, which I specified per the Pandoc command above.</p>
<p>BibDesk gets the job done alright, but only alright. Using a citation and reference management tool was a big win, though, and I fully intend to use one for every remaining project while in seminary—and, quite possibly, for other projects as well. Whether that tool is BibDesk or something else is a different matter entirely. (More on this below.)</p>
</section>
</section>
<section id="to-the-web" class="level2">
<h2>To the web!</h2>
<p>I wanted something more out of this process, if I could get it. One of the reasons I use plain text as a source is because from it, I can generate Word documents, <abbr>PDF</abbr>s, and <em>this website</em> with equal ease. However, Python Markdown knows nothing of <span class="tex">BibT<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> or citekeys, to my knowledge—and since I render everything for school with Pandoc, I have long wanted to configure <a href="http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.0/">Pelican</a> to use Pandoc as its Markdown engine instead of Python Markdown anyway.</p>
<p>As it happens, I actually set this up about a month ago. The process was pretty simple:<a href="#fn9" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref9" role="doc-noteref"><sup>9</sup></a></p>
<ol type="1">
<li>I installed the <a href="https://github.com/jstvz/pelican-pandoc-reader">pandoc-reader</a> Pelican extension.</li>
<li>I set the plugin path in my Pelican configuration file.</li>
<li>I specified the arguments to Pelican I wanted to use.</li>
</ol>
<p>The only additional tweaks necessary to get citation support were calling it with the <code>'--filter pandoc-citeproc'</code> arguments, which lets it process any bibliography data supplied in the header metadata for the files. Calling Pandoc with <code>--bibliography &lt;path to bibliography&gt;</code> (as in my example above) is a <a href="http://pandoc.org/README.html#citation-rendering">shortcut</a> for calling it with <code>--metadata &lt;path to bibliography&gt;</code> <em>and</em> the <code>--filter pandoc-citeproc</code> arguments. I could just supply the bibliography directly in the call from Pelican, but this would limit me to using a single bibliography file for <em>all</em> of my posts—something I’d rather not limit myself to, since it might make sense to build up bibliographies around specific subjects, or even to have smaller bibliographies associated with each project (exported from the main bibliography), which could then be freely available along with the contents of the paper itself.<a href="#fn10" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref10" role="doc-noteref"><sup>10</sup></a> (On this idea, see a bit more below under <strong>The Future</strong>.)</p>
<p>One word of warning: Pandoc is much slower to generate <abbr>HTML</abbr> with <code>--filter pandoc-citeproc</code> than <em>without</em> the filter, and the larger your site, the more you will feel this. (The time to generate the site from scratch jumped from about 10s to about 30s for me, with 270 articles, 17 drafts, 2 pages, and 1 hidden page, according to Pelican.) Pandoc has to process <em>every</em> article to check for citations, and that’s no small task. However, if you have Pelican’s content caching turned on, this is a one-time event. After that, it will only be processing any new content with it; total generation time is back down where it was before for me: the effort is all in generating the large indexes I use to display the content for the landing pages and for category and tag archives.</p>
<p>And the result: that same paper, rendered to <abbr>HTML</abbr> <a href="http://v4.chriskrycho.com/2015/not-exactly-a-millennium.html">on my website</a>, with citations and works cited, generated automatically and beautifully.</p>
<section id="other-site-generators" class="level3">
<h3>Other site generators</h3>
<p>I don’t know the situation around using Pandoc itself in other generators, including Jekyll—I simply haven’t looked. I do know, however, that there <em>is</em> some tooling for Jekyll specifically to allow a similar workflow. If you’re using Jekyll, it looks like your best bet is to check out <a href="https://github.com/inukshuk/jekyll-scholar">jekyll-scholar</a> and the <a href="https://github.com/inukshuk/citeproc-ruby">citeproc-ruby</a> project, which (like pandoc-citeproc) enables you to embed citations and filter them through <abbr>CSL</abbr>s to generate references automatically. As a note: you should definitely be able to get those working on your own deployment sites, but I have no idea whether it’s possible to do them with the GitHub Pages variant of Jekyll. (If anyone who reads this knows the answer to that, let me know on Twitter or App.net, and I’ll update the post accordingly.)</p>
</section>
</section>
<section id="the-future" class="level2">
<h2>The future</h2>
<p>In addition to continuing to use <span class="tex">BibT<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> with BibDesk as a way of managing my citations in the short term, I’m thinking about other ways to improve this workflow. One possibility is integrating with <a href="http://scholdoc.scholarlymarkdown.com">Scholdoc</a> as it matures, instead of <a href="http://pandoc.org">pandoc</a>, and maybe (hopefully, albeit unlikely) even contributing to it somewhat. I’m also open to using other citation library tools, though my early explorations with Mendeley and Zotero did not particularly impress me.</p>
<p>There are substantial advantages for the applications (and thus for most users) to maintaining the data in an application-specific format (e.g. an SQLite database) rather than on the file system—but the latter has the advantage of making it much easier to integrate with other tools. However, Zotero and Mendeley both natively export to <span class="tex">BibT<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> format, and Mendeley natively supports <a href="http://blog.mendeley.com/tipstricks/howto-use-mendeley-to-create-citations-using-latex-and-bibtex/">sync</a> to a <span class="tex">BibT<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> library (Zotero can do the same, but via third-party <a href="https://zoteromusings.wordpress.com/tag/bibtex/">plugins</a>), so those remain viable options, which I may use for future projects.</p>
<p>I also want to look at making my library of resources available publicly, perhaps (a) as a standalone library associated with each project, so that anyone who wants to can download it along with the Markdown source to play with as an example and (b) as a general library covering my various reading and research interests, which will certainly be irrelevant to most people but might nonetheless provide some value to someone along the way. I’m a big fan of making this kind of data open wherever possible, because people come up with neat things to do with it that the original creators never expect. Not <em>everything</em> should be open—but lots of things should, and this might be among them.</p>
</section>
<section id="summary" class="level2">
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p>I’m pretty happy with the current state of affairs, the aforementioned interest in other reference managers notwithstanding:</p>
<ul>
<li>I can set up the citations <em>once</em>, in a tool designed to manage references, instead of multiple times in multiple places.</li>
<li>I can use Pandoc and a <abbr>CSL</abbr> to get the citations formatted correctly throughout a paper, including generating the bibliography automatically.</li>
<li>I can use the same tooling, integrated into my static site generator, to build a web version of the content—with no extra effort, once I configured it properly the first time.</li>
</ul>
<p>Perhaps most importantly, this helps me meet one of my major goals for all my writing: to have a single canonical <em>source</em> for the content, which I will be able to access in the future regardless of what operating system I am using or what publishing systems come and go. Simple plain text files—Markdown—get me there. Now I’ve put good tools around that process, and I love it even more.</p>
</section>
<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p>Coming up with names for footnotes in Markdown can be painful in general for long documents. If you try to name them manually, like I do for posts on my website, you will very quickly end up wasting time on the names. If you try to number them, they will end up out of order in a hurry. My own <a href="http://2012-2013.chriskrycho.com/web/markdown-and-academic-writing/">previous solution</a> to this problem quickly became unwieldy for larger papers, and required a <em>lot</em> of hand-editing. Gladly, I no longer deal with that manually. Instead, I do all my drafting in <a href="http://www.ulyssesapp.com">Ulysses</a>, where you just type <code>(fn)</code> and it creates a footnote automatically, and will move that footnote <em>object</em> around transparently as you edit, handling all the number-setting, etc. on its own.<a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p>The irony of site for software which boasts that it is “a high-quality typesetting system” and looks like <a href="http://www.latex-project.org"><em>this</em></a> is not lost on me…<a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p>If you used the installers on Pandoc’s website, <code>pandoc-citeproc</code> comes with it. If you installed it via a package manager (e.g. by running <code>brew install pandoc</code>), it may not have, so you’ll need to install it manually yourself (e.g. <code>brew install pandoc-citeproc</code>).<a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn4" role="doc-endnote"><p>All of the content, including the rendered footnotes and the bibliography, has sensible content types set on it: headers are headers, body text is body text, etc. You can then customize to match the specifications of your style guide. I have a Chicago/Turabian style set set up with the formatting rules to match.<a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn5" role="doc-endnote"><p>Actually, it was even hairier than this, because I also had a <code>--reference-docx path/to/template.docx</code> specified. If you think it’s perhaps a bit too complex, well, I agree. I plan to turn that into a command line alias in pretty short order, because remembering it every time is just not going to happen.<a href="#fnref5" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn6" role="doc-endnote"><p>Using the <code>--reference-docx</code> argument to Pandoc, you can hand it a document that already uses your desired style set, so you don’t have to go in and apply it manually.<a href="#fnref6" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn7" role="doc-endnote"><p>I could have done that with Pandoc’s <span class="tex">L<span class="texA">A</span>T<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> <abbr>PDF</abbr> tools, as well, but didn’t really feel like taking the time to tweak the <span class="tex">L<span class="texA">A</span>T<span class="texE">E</span>X</span> template for it.<a href="#fnref7" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn8" role="doc-endnote"><p>Probably someone does, but not me, and not most people!<a href="#fnref8" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn9" role="doc-endnote"><p>If you’re using Pelican, you can take a look at my Pelican configuration file <a href="https://github.com/chriskrycho/chriskrycho.com/blob/ef3ecbca1765750392086355aeae026c1159d4b9/pelicanconf.py#L109">here</a> to see the full configuration for using Pandoc this way.<a href="#fnref9" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn10" role="doc-endnote"><p>Optimally, I’d really just prefer to be able to set <em>all</em> of these arguments at a per-file level—i.e., not use <code>--filter pandoc cite-proc</code> unless the file actually specifies a bibliography. And I could hack Pelican to do that; I’ve actually already <a href="https://github.com/liob/pandoc_reader/pull/5">messed around</a> with other, semi-related bits regarding Pelican and Pandoc’s shared handling of <abbr>YAML</abbr> metadata. But I’d prefer to keep my installation as “vanilla” as possible to minimize the cost of setting things up again on a new machine or after a crash, etc.<a href="#fnref10" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
Chris KrychoSun, 26 Jul 2015 13:50:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-07-26:/2015/academic-markdown-and-citations.htmlworkflowwritingFaithfulnesshttp://v4.chriskrycho.com/2015/faithfulness.html<p>It’s been a lot more than a month since the promised monthly update. I’ll blame it on a lack of self-discipline… or perhaps on the presence thereof.</p>
<p>Every day, we face choices about where to spend our time. In this particular season of life, that has often meant not writing, even things I <em>want</em> to write. I have a family to care for, a church to serve, work to do, and schoolwork to accomplish. Family is a daily endeavor, work and school nearly so, and church regular if not quite daily. In the midst of that, I have to decide: <em>What will I do today?</em></p>
<p>Our culture tends to put the question in terms of balance; my friend and pastor Ashok Nachnani suggested to me a while back that it is better to think in terms of <em>faithfulness</em>. “Balance” suggests holding all these things in equal proportion, juggling them against each other. “Faithfulness” suggests fulfilling the responsibilities as best we can, with the time we are given. The actual day-to-day outcome may not look particularly different, but it is an important shift in the way we think nonetheless. To be faithful may mean letting some desireable things go, and it may mean doing some things in a different way or to a lesser degree than we might like.</p>
<p>Writing, for example.</p>
<p>I <em>love</em> writing. I like keeping a public record for my friends and family to see how my life is. I enjoy stretching my mental muscles in the way that writing requires. I enjoy thinking through pen or keyboard. But faithfulness to the responsibilities God has given me right now means <em>not</em> trying to balance those desires against each other, and instead doing what is best for my family and my church. For the most part, right now that means not writing.</p>
<p>As I put it to Jaimie a while back, at this point in life I have time for one hobby—and only one. That hobby, at this point, is fitness. I run half marathons, and now I do triathlons (first one coming up in 10 days!). That takes up a non-trivial amount of time every week. It helps me in the other areas of my life, to be sure: it helps me be less physically tired, improves my focus in school and work, and serves to maintain my health. Nonetheless, it is hobby-like and it takes a substantial amount of time every day.</p>
<p>So right now, I write a great deal less than I want, and a great deal less than I did in college or early in our marriage. I miss the days when I had time to work on poetry for hours at a stretch, or simply to muse for a few thousand words. But it is far more important for me to spend time with Ellie and Kate than it is to write poetry, or to compose music, right now. Lord willing, I have 55–60 years ahead of me. Of those years, they will be close only another 15–20, and they will be the age they are today <em>only for today</em>. As much as writing and composing and hobby programming all look appealing to me, and as much as those really are good expressions of the ways God has gifted me, focusing on them would not be the most <em>faithful</em> use of my time—not today.</p>
<p>This is not to say that writing and composing and developing interesting software are not important. Rather: they <em>are</em> good and valuable things. But they are things to focus on at other times in life. As fast as this life goes, and I am increasingly aware that it goes quickly indeed, I can expect in the ordinary course of things to have <em>many</em> years available for those things. I can exercise my gifts faithfully in the right time and season. Today, I can learn to love my little girls well, invest deeply in their lives, and savor moments that will never come back.</p>
<p>Most of all, I must remind myself that teaching and shaping them is easily the most significant thing I will ever do. Should I write an essay that persuaded a thousand people to change their views on the arts, or to adopt a better view of the church, still my impact on two little lives would be more important. If I can point them faithfully to Christ and help them learn to walk faithfully with him as healthy members of his body, that will be a good life to have lived. Everything else is icing on the cake.</p>
<p>Icing is good, for the record. Sometimes, in these sorts of posts, we can mistake <em>relative importance</em> for <em>absolute importance</em>. I should, at various times in my life, make sure to exercise the good gifts God has given me in ways appropriate to that time and context. Right now, that means continuing to write, but less frequently. In the future, it will mean something else.</p>
<p>And all of this must stand in the context of resurrection hope. Too often, I live—too often, we <em>all</em> live—as though the next 60 years are all we may expect, the only time for writing and composing and so on. But it is not. I look forward to endless ages of creativity, exercising those gifts <em>more</em> fully than I am able now. So: Lord Jesus, come soon. And in the meantime, may I be faithful in each season to do as well as I can.</p>
Chris KrychoThu, 18 Jun 2015 17:00:00 -0400tag:v4.chriskrycho.com,2015-06-18:/2015/faithfulness.htmlfamilywriting